


this is no doctor who musical

by mayerwien



Series: shenanigans starkid au [1]
Category: Shenanigans (Original Universe), Time Ravel (Original Universe)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Theatre, Bad Matchmaking, Conventions, Demisexuality, Gen, Ireland, M/M, Matchmaking, Multi, Musicals, Theatre, elliot sings an entirely different genie-related song, jonah is the darren criss, nicholas is perfect as usual, performing arts majors AU, the matchmaker in question is doing his best, time ravel: the musical!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2019-12-25 20:25:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 49,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18268748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayerwien/pseuds/mayerwien
Summary: Elliot stirs his fair-trade Kenyan coffee. “So, who were you thinking of casting in this… post-apocalyptic, Antarctic Southern Gothic, time-but-not-space-traveling love story? And am I here just to be your sounding board, or are you going to ask me where we can procure actual icebergs to decorate the stage with?”“I was thinking we should worry about writing all of it first before we think about casting, or icebergs,” Hazel says. “And yes, I saidwe,because the next thing I was going to say was—how do you feel about writing the songs for it?”Elliot will think, later, that this was the kind of deal he was born to make.





	1. best thing that ever happened

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/gifts), [earlgreytea68](https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/gifts), [celestexists](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestexists/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Introducing: Shenanigans](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11757003) by [Aja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja), [earlgreytea68](https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68). 



> Hi Aja and EGT! I’ve actually been sitting on this since November 2017, but only got off my ass to attempt to finish it now; hope you don’t mind that I’m playing in your sandbox for a bit. (I also just wanted to say, thank you times a billion for on-the-page demisexual Elliot; it has made this flaming demisexual happier than you could ever possibly know.)
> 
> To the uninitiated, this is a fic set in the Shenanigansverse, which you can immerse yourself in starting with [this primer](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11757003), and then either one of the two main storylines, [Hays Code Love Scene](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11763933/chapters/26518512) or [Alter Ego](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11763891/chapters/26518410). If you’re already familiar, then just a quick explanation—in this AU, they ALL graduated from performing arts programs in college, and they’ve all already learned how to work together pretty well in spite of their differences/eccentricities/drink preferences.
> 
> Finally, this one goes out to Celeste, the Jane to my Elliot, my bff and the reason why I fell into the Shenanigans pit in the first place. (I know I know I’m supposed to be writing the Other Musical Theatre Thing DON’T KILL ME)

_and oh, you’re suddenly a stranger_

_there’s no explaining where you stand_

- "Songs for A New World"

 

\--

 

The musical theatre company began, as things so often do among Elliot and his group of friends, entirely as a joke.

It had been the first weekend of their junior year of college. Blake threw a back-to-school party at his parents’ house, just like always, and after partaking heartily of smores and bourbon cocktails and smores that had been dipped not-entirely-accidentally in the bourbon cocktails, they’d all sprawled out in the luxurious rec room watching the only decent thing on TV, which just so happened to be the second Narnia movie.

“Did you guys ever think that Aslan is kind of an asshole?” Jane muttered, sinking lower into the beanbag she shared with Caroline as onscreen, some janky CGI creatures charged into battle with some other janky CGI creatures. “I mean, he keeps kicking them out of Narnia and back into World War Two. Even the White Witch didn’t do _that,_ she just liked snow so much she wanted it to snow all the time.”

“In saying that, you completely ignore the fact that in _The Magician’s Nephew_ the White Witch spoke the Deplorable Word which effectively caused the massacre of an entire world, just to take the throne of Charn from her sister,” Hazel retorted.

“Wait, but Aslan is Jesus,” Jonah said, sounding mildly scandalized. “You can’t call Jesus an asshole.”

“I thought you were an agnostic,” Nicholas commented, from where he was sitting neatly on the sofa with Elliot’s head in his lap. Nicholas was absently petting Elliot’s head, and Elliot was so content he was petting Nicholas’ knee back.

“I don’t have to be religious to admire Jesus for the radical historical figure he so obviously is.” Jonah sniffed.

“Are you sure it’s the historical Jesus you admire, and not just the 2011 _Godspell_ revival Jesus as portrayed by Corbin Bleu?” teased Evan, throwing a cushion at Jonah.

Jonah received the cushion full in the face, then threw it back at Evan, protesting, “That was a criminally underrated performance by a criminally underrated former Disney star, and you know it.”

“Shhh, all of you, I can’t hear Ben Barnes’ abs,” Caroline said, untangling her legs from Jane’s and crawling off the beanbag and closer to the TV.  

Partly because he knew it would get a rise out of some of the people in the room, and partly just because he was feeling warm and buzzed and happy, Elliot raised his voice and started singing, to a tune he’d just made up. _“Aslan is a dick, Aslan is a dick,_ _he’s a Christian allegory, but I’m not even sorry, ‘cause Aslan’s a great big dick.”_

And then, cackling with glee, Jonah slid over to Blake’s baby grand piano and started banging out the melody Elliot had just sung—but fully fleshed out with jingly chords, ragtime-style. _“Aslan is a dick, Aslan is a dick,”_ Jonah sang, _“he’ll make you go to Mass, then he’ll bite you in the ass, ‘cause Aslan’s a great big dick!”_ Then Elliot and Evan joined in, and eventually everyone was singing it, throwing in their own verses, making it a round song, until they were completely dissolving in laughter on the floor.

“That was intense,” Blake gasped, once he’d caught his breath. “We should make it like, a full-length musical parody.”

“Hey, yeah.” Elliot grinned. “Jane, you can do prod design, and Hazel, you can direct, and I’ll be your stage manager. And Hazel’s boyfriend can write the book—“

“I’m _right_ here, I can _hear_ you not remembering my name,” Hazel’s boyfriend interjected.

“And Jonah can write the songs,” Elliot continued blithely, ticking them all off on his fingers, “and Evan can act, and Blake can act, and Kate can act, and Nicholas—“

“And Nicholas?” Nicholas repeated, amused, and peered down through his glasses at Elliot. “What makes you think I’d be willing to take part in this shenanigan?”

“Because it’s _my_ shenanigan,” Elliot said. “Obviously.”

“Ours,” Jonah corrected, poking Elliot in the ribs.

They proceeded to joke about casting, and discussed the possibility of getting Evan’s girlfriend Anna to do costumes with those tiny wizard hands of hers, and then played a couple of rounds of Wii bowling before falling asleep all over the rec room. But the next morning, after they’d woken up and sat around the dining table quietly eating their waffles, Elliot, Hazel, and Jonah all blurted out at the same time, “So about that Narnia parody musical.”

The script got written in less than a week. Hazel and Hazel’s boyfriend linked everybody to the Google doc, and though a few people chimed in with a few small edits, they all agreed it was solid; the parody was a mashup of the best-known elements across the entire Narnia series, and took Aslan the holy, enigmatic talking lion and turned him into a hilarious, over-the top, self-centered and extremely blatant jerk. The musical would be about the four Pevensie kids returning to Narnia and dealing with their realization of that fact, on top of having to save the land again _and_ struggling with The Many Changes That Come With Puberty. “It’s a loving send-up. A parody with heart,” Hazel said proudly, and it really was.

In between their classes, Jonah commandeered the piano in one of the rehearsal rooms and worked on the songs, with Jane, Elliot, and Blake contributing a line here and a riff there—and once it was all written down and more or less presentable, they got the green light from their professors to use it as their final project. At the end of the semester, for one night and one night only, _NARNIA BIZNESS! A Musical Parody_ was officially going to be staged at the Paramount.

Throughout all of rehearsals, recording the backing tracks, the set design process, Nicholas getting sick and losing his voice for almost a month, and even the dreaded tech week—Elliot, the Best Stage Manager Ever, tackled every minor and major hiccup with an aggressively cheerful fury. Because in spite of how this shenanigan had somehow become _legitimized by the academe,_ and therefore in his eyes was slightly diminished, spirit-of-revolution-wise, Elliot was having the time of his life, and he wanted this to go off without a hitch.

It wasn’t until the night of their performance, however, when the hot lights clicked on and flooded the full theater, and he watched from the wings as Blake paraded onto the stage while twirling the tail of the off-brand lion onesie they’d bought on Amazon, that Elliot stopped and thought— _holy shit, we made_ magic.

After curtain call, amidst the backstage hugging and crying and flowers, Elliot squeezed his way through the crowd to Caroline and whispered in her ear to send him a copy of the video she’d taken of the show with her camcorder and tripod. As soon as he got it, he put it up on YouTube, made a Facebook page for their musical to share the video from, and invited everyone from Emerson on his friends list to like and watch it. Then those people started sharing it with their friends, and they started sharing it with _their_ friends—and a mere three days later, _NARNIA!_ had 30,000 views and counting.

“What if we made this a regular thing?” Hazel asked excitedly during the emergency lunch meeting she’d called, as they all crowded around her laptop to stare at the numbers and scroll through the comments section in disbelief. “What if—we did a new, different show every year?”

“We’re graduating next year,” Evan pointed out.

“So what?” Elliot flapped his hand airily. “We just went _viral._ We’re going to be star alumni. They’re going to put our picture on the website, just you wait, and after graduation they’re going to _beg_ us to come back and use their tiny theater space for our increasingly lavish annual productions.”

“Well. If we’re really going to do this, we need a team name,” Jane said, and Elliot smiled.

And so it was that the Shenanigans Theatre Company put on _Tintin in Massachusetts_ for their senior year musical. It was a somewhat controversial choice for a parody, and they had debated about it a lot during the conceptualization stage; Jane was worried the audience wouldn’t be familiar enough with the source material, much less understand that the whole joke was that they were amping up the homoerotic subtext—but it turned out to be just as much of a hit, if not bigger, than _NARNIA!_ had been. They originally only planned for three shows, but had to schedule three more at the last minute because tickets sold out so fast. The lines stretched all the way down the hall and through the building, and it wasn’t just students, either; it was teachers who had heard about it, and staff, and alumni, and even a couple of the upper-upper-class big-name donors who had made contributions to the college. People were coming in from _out of town_ to see it. They were _crying_ genuine tears during the finale. Elliot looked around at his friends and felt on top of the world.

And then after their closing night show, while they were all packing up the props and shimmying out of their costumes, a middle-aged woman with cropped hair and wine-colored lipstick walked right out of the audience and tapped Jonah on the shoulder. Turns out one of the students who’d watched it that night had brought her mom along, and said mom was actually a casting director whose current project was a musical TV show about a group of waiters who were also aspiring actors, and she’d been so impressed by Jonah’s performance in drag as Bianca Castafiore that she wanted him to come in and audition.

“If I get it, I’ll have to move to LA,” Jonah whispered later that night, while he and Elliot and Nicholas were lying on the floor of the apartment the three of them shared (and which Elliot had dubbed the Eggplant, in spite of Nicholas’ insisting it didn’t make sense because the walls were mauve, _not purple)._ The whole night, Jonah kept pushing his own hair back from his forehead, and shaking his head, and randomly bursting out into little gasps of disbelieving laughter. “This is so surreal,” he kept saying, looking up at the ceiling, his grin stretching from ear to ear.

“You deserve this,” Nicholas said, smiling. “I’m so happy for you.”

“While I agree that our Jonah deserves all the success he gets—I believe there is an old adage about counting chickens that applies here,” Elliot said.

But of course Jonah’s hatched, because he was Jonah.

Graduation came and went, and so did their goodbye party for Jonah at Pagu, where they made ridiculously mournful speeches and toasted with their squid ink oyster baos. “You’re still always going to be part of Shenanigans,” Hazel promised Jonah solemnly, as she draped Castafiore’s plastic pearl necklace over his head.

And then Jonah was gone, and then Evan and Anna packed up and moved to New York. And the rest of them were still in Boston, getting shitty fresh-grad jobs. It only made them throw themselves into their first out-of-school production that much harder on the weekends. _Rise of the Redshirts,_ their Star Trek parody which ended up running for two whole weeks at the Charlestown Working Theater, was by far their most polished production—with a bigger set, better lighting, more elaborate backing tracks, and more refined costumes (the budgeting was hell, but Jane is nothing if not a miracle worker). Hazel sent Jonah the script, so even if he couldn’t be in the musical, he was still able to write all the songs for it in between filming his TV show, doing demos for them over Skype.

It went great. More than great. After they put the _Redshirts_ videos up on YouTube they had more followers and online fan engagement than ever. Which was why immediately after it, Elliot started to wonder what they could do to top it. Because if there’s one thing he knows, it’s that nothing—not time, not distance, _nothing_ —can possibly be allowed to get in the way of what they can all do together.

 

For months, they throw around ideas about what major property they want to butcher this time— _Supernatural, Inception,_ the _Queer Eye_ reboot _—_ but nothing really seems to stick. Then, to Elliot’s utter surprise, one afternoon Hazel texts only him and asks him if he’s free for coffee.

As soon as Elliot walks into the café, Hazel says, “I know I can trust you to be honest, even if you’re not always nice about it, so. Tell me what you think,” she says, and gives him the elevator pitch for an original musical about an ordinary bookseller and a mysterious time-traveler, which she’s calling _Time Ravel._

“So basically, it’s going to be Doctor Who: The Musical?” Elliot asks when she’s finished.

Hazel narrows her eyes at him. “No,” she states flatly, and proceeds to explain the plot to him in more detail.

“Okay, so it’s not _entirely_ Doctor Who: The Musical,” Elliot concedes, while Hazel makes a growling noise under her breath. (Secretly, he’s kicking himself for not thinking of doing an original musical before she did.) “Admittedly, my interest is piqued. But I think you are missing a crucial point here.”

Hazel folds her arms and cocks her head. “Intriguing. Please elaborate.”

“What you have on your hands is not a true crime-sans-truth story. What you have is a _romance.”_ Elliot sits back, triumphant after letting this arrow fly. “Your boy and this Mysterious Man? They’re not just in this for the adventure, they’re in this for _each other._ Think about it.”

Hazel’s eyebrows go all the way up. Elliot can see the thought embedding itself in her brain, as it should. _Bullseye._ “Point very much taken. I’ll revisit my outline.”

Elliot stirs his fair-trade Kenyan coffee. “So, who were you thinking of casting in this… post-apocalyptic, Antarctic Southern Gothic, time-but-not-space-traveling love story? And am I here just to be your sounding board, or are you going to ask me where we can procure actual icebergs to decorate the stage with?”

“I was thinking we should worry about writing all of it first before we think about casting, or icebergs,” Hazel says. “And yes, I said _we,_ because the next thing I was going to say was—how do you feel about writing the songs for it? Just you?”

Elliot will think, later, that this was the kind of deal he was born to make. But in the moment, he’s able to play it cool and ask casually, “Me? Not Jonah?”

“Jonah is busier than ever now over there.” Hazel sighs. “More than that though, I realized this particular story demands your particular composition skills. Like, if Sondheim and Jeanine Tesori had a lovechild, and that lovechild listened to a lot of Robyn in the womb.”

“Hmmm.” Elliot pretends to think about it. “Do you solemnly swear to not question my syncopation?”

“Do _you_ solemnly swear to not backseat direct when we’re doing blocking and insist that the scene needs more sexually charged traveling to downstage?” Hazel retorts.

Elliot nods, and Hazel does too. Then they shake hands on it, like good collaborators.

“An original musical,” Hazel says, and the grin spreads across her face. “The fandom’s going to lose. Their. _Shit.”_

 

\--

 

The Shenanigans Company turned the guest house in Blake’s parents’ backyard into their base of operations long ago. Caroline put their framed cast photos up on the walls, and the bookshelf in the den is a glorious mess of art books and songbooks and a mixture of official and bootleg show DVDs. Nicholas even keeps some of his vinyls in the guest house, for Saturdays when they converge ostensibly to work, but mostly just to hang out.   

It’s on one such Saturday there that the _Time Ravel_ team gets together for a self-imposed lockdown. Hazel and her boyfriend are furiously revising the script in one corner, Hazel on her laptop and her boyfriend in his tiny, suspicious black leather notebook, while Elliot is sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the keyboard and working on the songs.

“Elliot, you’ve been ignoring my Slack messages,” Jane says as she comes through the door, dropping her jacket onto the back of a chair.

“Slack is for boring work. Boring work is for weekdays.” Elliot chews on the end of his pen. “Weekends are for Craft.”

Jane purses her lips. “Not when you forget to remove all your custom labels from the emails in the ticket queue, so all your poor help desk lackeys have to spend three hours sorting through messages tagged ‘This Person Lacks Basic Netiquette’ and ‘Just Tell This One To Fucking Google It’ instead of actually _answering_ the messages.”

“Thank God you and I work at the same place,” Elliot sighs. “What would I do without you?”

The corner of Jane’s mouth quirks upwards. “Perish, no doubt.”

Ever since he Entered the WorkforceTM, Elliot’s thought that it’s so bizarre to be famous in certain circles for this one thing, this big important piece of your life—but also to go to a grueling tech startup job every day where nobody _knows_ about it. Sometimes when his boss is giving him pointed looks and passive-aggressively mentioning how some employees are always _just_ under the number of required hours, Elliot wants to yell at him _do you know I have fans? Who make phone wallpapers of my actual FACE?_

Jane collapses onto the sofa next to Blake, who is on his phone no doubt looking up Damien Hirst exhibits, or how to purchase and care for a flamingo, or something equally Blake-esque. “How’s the music coming along?” she asks Elliot.

“It’s oozing,” Elliot replies with a grimace. “Oozing along like mud.” Currently, he’s writing the song where the Mysterious Man first swoops into Sebastien’s shop and offers him an adventure; he’s been stuck on it for a week now, and he’s not sure why.

_Would you like to come and cause a little chaos with me,_ Elliot writes. He stares at the sheet of paper for a while, frowning and trying out the meter in his head, then crosses out the first three words and changes the line to, _Do you dare to come and cause a little chaos with me?_

Rereading the rest of the lyrics he has so far, Elliot reaches for his phone and types out a text to Nicholas, who’s still at work. _Three good rhymes for “temporal,” go._

The reply comes almost instantly, even though Nicholas probably has at least one of his hands literally full of Lego blocks or dirty diapers right at that moment. _Femoral. Nemoral. Extemporal? I know you’re going to say that last one is lazy, though._

_Extremely indolent of you,_ Elliot answers, even though he’s grinning. _I’m deeply disappointed, Nicholas. To what end was your degree if this is all you have to offer me?_

_The online rhyming dictionary is right there,_ Nicholas answers mildly.

Flopping onto his back on the carpet with a sigh, Elliot decides to take a break and scroll through Tumblr. Of all of them, Elliot is the only one who still checks the fan blogs religiously. Back when they all first realized the fan blogs existed, they had an afternoon of good laughs and awww’s over them.

The fans started with just commentary on the musicals, and reposts of Caroline’s behind-the-scenes Instagram photos of Jane standing on a stepladder to adjust something on set, or of Elliot and Jonah sitting at the music room piano. Then those became fanmade gifsets: of Blake leading them in dance rehearsals for the big ensemble numbers, of Nicholas turning around in his computer chair stroking Ian Purrtis like a Bond villain, of all the times Elliot was caught on video forgetting Hazel’s boyfriend’s name.

It didn’t take long for the fans to start shipping them. One weekend, Blake threw a party that consisted of all of them doing drunk dramatic readings of fanfics about themselves, but they had to stop when it got too weird. (“I would never say that,” Caroline protested at the end of one story, and Elliot added with horror, “And I would never DRINK that.”)

The thing is, though, Elliot Gets the fanfics. And secretly, he likes to think that some of those stories actually will come true; that Jane will singlehandedly create the world’s first set design incorporating fully sentient robots; that Nicholas will become a famous dramatherapist in Hollywood and care for all the Kardashian children; that Evan and Anna will come back home to get married on the stage of the Paramount and Elliot will be their extremely well-dressed flower boy. If asked, Elliot would say he’s the kind of person who always chooses to do the things in life that will make the best stories to tell later on. Frankly, the world would be a much happier, more exciting place if everyone else lived by the same principle.

Elliot goes through Twitter next, logged into the official Shenanigans account, and likes a tweet that just reads _no one: / me: (KICKS DOWN DOOR SINGING) I’M COMING OUT OF THE WARDROBE AND IT’S GONNA BE ALL RIGHT._ From his spot on the sofa, Blake remarks, “Hey, it’s almost six,” and turns the TV on.

Almost six on Saturday nights means the new episode of _Still Waiting._ (Back when it premiered, they’d all made a whole pizza party night of it. “They _autotuned_ him,” Elliot said in disgust the second Jonah opened his mouth to sing. “What a waste of a perfectly passable tenor.”) Elliot doesn’t follow the plot much, now, but he knows at least Blake and Caroline do. He’s pretty sure Caroline has a secret _Still Waiting_ stan Twitter.

As the theme song plays, Jane remarks, “I wonder how this show’s doing with the Nielsen households. Wasn’t there a steep drop in ratings after that godawful car accident plot twist?”

“I have a feeling they’re going to make up for it this season by having Jonah’s character get together with the hot older food expeditor, Alejandro,” Blake says with authority. “Nothing says chemistry like two people yelling at each other about broken hollandaise.”  

On cue, Jonah appears on the screen, lying supine on the kitchen counter with one arm flung dramatically over his eyes. The music starts, and the camera cuts to a close-up of his face as he sits up and leaps off the counter, snatching up his apron. _“I’m breaking my mother’s heart,”_ he sings with a smirk, flapping his apron out and slipping smoothly into it. Elliot knows that smirk well; it’s Jonah’s Danny Zuko, Prince Caspian, yes-I-know-how-hot-I-am-thank-you-very-much smirk. _“The longer I stand looking at you—“_

“He let them give him an _undercut?”_ Elliot wrinkles his nose in disbelief. “God. When you sell out, you _really_ sell out.”

“I think an undercut suits his noble profile,” Blake says loyally.

While the others continue to watch Jonah sing “Shiksa Goddess” flirtatiously at his fellow waiters as he whisks plates out of the kitchen, Elliot logs into the Shenanigans email with the intention of just cleaning out the spam. He’s so irritated by the arrangement of the song blaring from the TV that he almost misses the email and sweeps it into the trash with the rest—but the subject line _Invitation to StrangelyCon!_ catches his eye just in time.

_Dear Team Shenanigans,_ the email reads. _Hello from Ireland! We would like to formally invite you to be our honored guest performers at the fifth annual StrangelyCon, to be held in the Convention Centre Dublin from August 15-17._

“Attention!” Elliot yells, whipping his head up and frantically flapping his hand at Blake and the remote control. “Turn that monstrosity off, we have a proposition!” Jane sits up, and Hazel and Hazel’s boyfriend stop writing and move closer as Elliot reads the email aloud for all of them.

“It’s two months away. They want us to do a _concert,_ and have a _Q &A session_ and _autograph signing_ afterwards,” Elliot finishes, with mounting delight.

“StrangelyCon in Dublin,” says Jane, who of course immediately looked it up on her phone. “It’s a fairly new convention, but it’s pretty well-attended. Not like, the whole Javits, but a sizable chunk of the Javits.”

“I think it sounds perfect.” Hazel’s eyes are glinting. “Our first international appearance. From the sound of it, a lot of our fans will be there—and it’s a chance to reel in some new ones, too.”

Elliot is already texting Nicholas. _Hey, aren’t you one-eighth Irish?_

Nicholas texts back, _One-thirty-twoth. Thirty-secondth? And no, unfortunately, there is no family leprechaun gold to speak of._

_If there were, you could afford to buy us a much nicer apartment,_ Elliot replies, grinning.

Hazel is still talking, and it takes a while for what she’s saying to register. “—ask Evan and Anna now, and I can message Jonah, too. Once it’s all settled, we can book our trip and start working on a setlist.”  

“Wait, what?” Elliot stares. _“Jonah?”_

“Well, yeah.” Hazel is giving him a strange look. “We’re not doing this without him.”

“But—I thought you said he was busy. I mean, _clearly_ he’s busy.” Elliot is struggling to fit this new piece of information into the dossier in his mind.

“He can ask to get a few days off two months from now, I’m sure,” Hazel says, already typing into her phone. “Besides, do you honestly expect him to pass up the chance to wear that red dress again? He’ll be thrilled.”

“So we’re really doing this?” Blake looks around eagerly.

“I mean, I’m in.” Jane leans back with a smile. “This should be fun.”

Elliot opens his mouth to say—something, he’s not entirely sure what—but he’s distracted by a new message from Nicholas. _Elliot, if I had a pile of leprechaun gold, I wouldn’t be forced to still be sharing an apartment with you in the first place._

_So good thing your family isn’t leprechauns,_ Elliot texts, a grin forming on his face again in spite of everything.

_Ha,_ is Nicholas’ reply. _Good thing._

 

\--

 

Nicholas is always tired after night shifts at the childcare center, but he still has time to throw a pasta together for dinner. When they’re spooning the last of the refrigerator cheesecake out of the Tupperware, Nicholas guesses, “You’re thinking about Jonah.”

Elliot stops squishing Ian Purrtis’s face in his hands and frowns. “Did Hazel text you about Jonah?”

“She didn’t have to. The second I got the message about the con in the group chat, I could feel you chafing from halfway across the city.” Nicholas sweeps scattered graham cracker crumbs off the table and into a napkin. “When’s the last time you talked to him?”

Elliot shrugs. “Can’t remember.”

It’s not like Elliot didn’t try to keep in touch with Jonah, at first. But it was always just, _hey Jonah, what are you up to; oh, getting ready to go to the SAG Awards dinner, how about you?_ What is anyone supposed to say to that?

They were known to work well together, in the past. They even _lived_ together for several years. But now that it seemed like neither of them was bothering to keep in touch, Elliot wondered—were he and Jonah ever really _friends_ to begin with?

So he doesn’t care now, really. It doesn’t bother him. He never thinks about Jonah.

Nicholas piles all their plates up and stands to take them to the sink. “Hey,” he says as he stops on the way into the kitchen, bumping Elliot’s shoulder gently with his hip. “I know you’ve always had that…rivalry thing going on with him, and that when he left it threw a wrench into your works, but—“

“What!” Elliot is appalled. “We don’t have a rivalry thing. Our rivalry is a non-thing. Why does everyone keep thinking it’s a thing?”

“Well, you have to admit, you were jealous that he was the main songwriter during our first year as Shenanigans,” Nicholas points out mildly. “And that he beat you out to play Cornelius Hackl in the sophomore year showcase.”

“Well, I’m certainly not jealous of Jonah now that he’s singing terrible pop arrangements of Jason Robert Brown.” Elliot lifts his chin. “And also, his leaving did nothing to me. My works are _extremely_ wrench-less. And also also, I don’t want to talk about Jonah right now, because Jonah is not what’s important. What’s important is that we put on a good show in August. That’s all I’m thinking about. Okay?”

“Okay.” Nicholas looks at Elliot, and there’s a certain quality to the look, something tender and uncertain, like there’s something Nicholas is afraid of breaking. Things don’t normally give Elliot reason to pause, but pause he does.

“Hey,” Elliot says. “Leave the dishes for a while and sing with me, Nicholas.”

Nicholas smiles. “Okay.”

Elliot switches his keyboard on and tosses Nicholas the pile of papers that comprises all the _Time Ravel_ music he has so far. Nicholas frowns at them and turns them upside-down trying to read them, twice. “You’re lucky I can understand the way you notate,” Nicholas says finally, settling on the sofa with Ian Purrtis curled up next to him. “Whose part am I doing?”

“Sebastien’s.” Elliot does a glissando just because he can, then plays the first chords of the opening number.

_“Sorry, hey there, I just closed up for the night,”_ Nicholas sings, his voice low and clear. _“But is there something you’re looking for?”_

Elliot continues to play, while putting on the kind of voice he thinks the Mysterious Man should have, dark and swarthy. _“Thoreau, Austen, Auden, Hans Christian Andersen. Kafka, Murakami, Proust, Proust, Proust,”_ he sings, listing off all the books Sebastien has on his shelves. _“Oh, what’s this? Fifty Shades of Grey?”_ he ad-libs, and Nicholas throws his head back and laughs, while Ian Purrtis yowls a counterpoint.

Nothing’s really ever so bad, Elliot thinks, so long as he has these two to come home to.

 

\--

 

The realization that Elliot possibly has capital-F Feelings for Nicholas slowly creeps up on him, and then surprises him by smacking him in the face, exactly the way that one John Green movie says it does. It arrives in bits and pieces—in the nice coffee and burnt Eggos Nicholas makes him in the morning, in the random texts he sends while they’re both at work.

In the way sometimes Elliot catches Nicholas looking at him from across the room, with a smile Elliot’s never seen him use on anyone else. All of it adds up to something, and Elliot spends several days squinting at Nicholas as he moves around the apartment picking up cat hair with the lint roller, trying to figure out what that _something_ is.

He’s not sure, however, until the first weekend that Hazel rounds everyone up for the ironing-out of the setlist and a rehearsal session in Blake’s parents’ backyard. “We’ll kick off with ‘Boldly Go,’ and then transition into ‘The Next Great Story,’” Hazel announces, scribbling it down on her clipboard and running her finger down the list of songs. “Yada yada, yada yada…Blake and Elliot, you’re doing ’Blistering Barnacles’, right?”

“Of course,” Blake says cheerfully, flicking the end of his scarf over his shoulder. Elliot already has his Professor Calculus ear trumpet in.

Hazel nods. “Then we’ve got…Evan and Jane on ‘Turkish Delight,’ everybody on ‘The Kobayashi-Maru of Love,’ and our big encore number will be ‘Out of the Wardrobe,’” she says with satisfaction.

“I hope the stage is big enough for everyone,” Caroline pipes up, snapping away with her camera as they all do their warmup stretches. “Especially considering all the jazz pirouettes we have.”

“Why did we have those, again?” Kate asks with a grimace, looking at Blake.

Blake opens his hands in a _what can you do_ gesture. “Alas, we were younger and more limber then.”

Hazel’s already told them it’s all set. Along with Evan and Anna, Jonah is going to be flying in for the week that they’re in Dublin. Following the official announcement online, the fans have been really excited about the whole team being back together. Many of them are excited mostly about Jonah; Elliot pointedly doesn’t heart those tweets. (“Is he even going to have enough time to rehearse with us?” Elliot grumbled. “We can’t have someone screwing up the steps and making us look like amateurs.”)

During this first rehearsal, however, it’s clear all of them are a little bit in trouble; minor chaos ensues as they try out the little skits Hazel’s boyfriend has written to link the songs together, and try to remember choreography they haven’t done in years. Everyone keeps bumping into each other and arguing about whose turn it is to bell kick—and Elliot is slightly frazzled having to play all the songs from memory, and then tired of having Blake screech at him for not playing it the same way each time because it doesn’t give people enough time to move into place.

“Okay, okay, fifteen-minute recess,” Hazel says after two hours of this, falling to the ground.

“Thank God.” Jane drags her hand down the side of her face. “I was dying for a smoke break.”

Nicholas gets up, shaking out his limbs. “I’ll go with you.”

“What do you guys talk about on your smoke breaks?” Elliot asks. “I feel like I’m missing out. Maybe I should start smoking. Or maybe I should start carrying those New Year’s sparklers around with me, so every time you go on a smoke break I can light a sparkler instead of a cigarette and do light painting around you.”

“Don’t start smoking, it’s terrible for you,” Jane says, at the same time Nicholas says, “You spend way too much time on Pinterest.”

Elliot reaches over and switches the keyboard to the random sound effects setting, which Jane always says is the aural equivalent of the Wingdings font, and escorts Nicholas and Jane out with a cacophony of duck quacks and car horns.

“This…won’t be a problem, right?” Blake looks deeply concerned. “I didn’t realize just how out of practice we were for our older shows.”

“Oh, we’ll be fine. We have two months. That’s plenty of time! Babies are conceived and born in that span of time.” Elliot plays a trill with the keyboard in marimba mode.

Kate frowns. “No, they aren’t.”

“North American opossum babies are,” Caroline says reasonably.

Elliot gives Caroline an approving look. Cracking his knuckles, he turns to look at Hazel. “Hey, you know what we should do? We should do some songs from _Time Ravel._ You know, as a preview. Get people talking about it, get them to donate to the Patreon.”

Hazel looks skeptical. “Will any of the songs be finished by then?”

“Oh, I’ll have several of them finished,” Elliot assures her. “Especially the first big Sebastien-Mysterious Man duet. It’s an opportunity to show off the chemistry between the characters…that’ll be a huge draw.”

“Who’s going to sing them, though?” Hazel’s boyfriend asks. “Since we haven’t cast the roles yet.”

“Well, I can sing MM, if we’re not doing anything fancy with staging,” Elliot says, waggling his fingers. “I can just sit behind the keyboard. And as for Sebastien…”

“Oh! What about Jonah?” Hazel asks.

“What _about_ Jonah?” Elliot replies, frowning.

“Jonah,” Hazel says slowly, as though he is stupid, “can sing for Sebastian.”

“Jonah,” Elliot says through gritted teeth, “is not going to be around to be in the final product.” From the other side of the swimming pool, Caroline is giving him a Look that he is deciding to ignore.

“Does it…matter?” Blake blinks. “You said it’s just a demo anyway, right? I do think his voice would suit the role.”

It occurs to Elliot that Jonah is being brought up an awful lot these days, for someone who isn’t even physically present. “Well, yes, but he won’t have time to learn the song,” Elliot protests. Right at that moment Jane and Nicholas come back into the yard, and Elliot is struck with inspiration. “And besides—Nicholas!” he says in a louder voice, “Nicholas wants to sing Sebastien’s part! You were just saying this to me just the other day, weren’t you, Nicholas?”

“I…was?” Nicholas blinks.

“Oh, don’t be so coy. Remember, the other day when we were singing all of  ‘Mere Anarchy’ for the first time, and you were complimenting me on my _incredible_ songwriting prowess, and you said, _I love singing as Sebastien, I would love to sing as Sebastien for the rest of my life?”_ Elliot says, in his most convincing this-totally-happened tone of voice.

“Ah,” Nicholas says. “Of course. _That_ day.” He glances at Hazel, and it’s proof that he loves Elliot when he says, “I mean, I could, if you’d like me to. I’ve been road-testing the songs with Elliot quite a bit, so I’m familiar with all of them so far.”

Hazel looks slightly conflicted, but the satisfied look on Elliot’s face and the calm earnestness on Nicholas’s combined seem to do the trick. “Well, sure,” she says finally. “We can work one or two _Time Ravel_ songs into the second half of the program, then.”

Elliot claps his hands together once. “Perfect! Okay, everyone, break’s over! Let’s warm back up!” he yells, clapping repeatedly, and they proceed to play a long round of Zip Zap Zop that finally loosens them all up, and gets them all laughing and collapsing onto the grass.

“Do you ever wonder,” Elliot says dreamily to Nicholas on the cab ride home later that night, “if our actual lives were a musical—which parts would be worthy of getting turned into musical numbers?”

Nicholas hums. “Maybe that time we walked to Walden Pond. When you brought the pineapple? That was a good day.”

“Yeah, it was.” Elliot grins at the memory. “I was thinking of the day we all went shopping for clothes to wear to graduation. I already know how I’d stage that one, it’d have trolleys of macarons and long rolling racks of three-piece suits, and merrily dancing shop attendants using hatboxes as stepping-stools.”

“I like how graduation shopping was worthy of an entire musical number, and not our graduation itself.”

“Wait, I know. The pop-up corn dog stand, freshman year,” Elliot says. “The corn dog stand is definitely its own song.”

“Is it?” Nicholas’s voice sounds amused, in that fond way that’s become so very familiar over the years.

“Nicholas.” Elliot is shocked. “It’s our _origin story._ It’s our ‘Take a Chance on Me.’ Except you were a considerably less reluctant Josephine.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say _considerably,”_ Nicholas jokes, and then laughs at the strangled indignant sound Elliot makes.

It’s then that a bus passes by outside, shedding light through their cab window and illuminating Nicholas’s shape. And in that brief moment of silence, Elliot really sees the look on Nicholas’s face, and it sends warmth flooding through his chest, and the thought that suddenly crosses his mind is, _what if I want him to look at me like that forever._

And then, finally, Elliot thinks, _well, shit._

“Uh,” Elliot says intelligently, blinking and swallowing the lump in his throat. “I—we haven’t had dinner yet.”

“Do you want to go out for something?” Nicholas asks.

“No!” Elliot yelps—because right in this moment going out for dinner would feel too much like a date, and the idea of that is making him panic. He yelps it a little too loudly, though, because Nicholas frowns quizzically. “I mean,” Elliot stutters, “no, it’s okay, we can Seamless something when we get home.” And then he realizes that he and Nicholas literally _live together,_ and they call their shared apartment _home,_ and that makes him panic even more. Why is everything just so _much?_

So later that evening, after a shared meal of Thai food during which Elliot is very careful not to do anything like accidentally brush against Nicholas’s hand when reaching for another spring roll—Elliot shuts himself in his bedroom, flings himself onto the safety of his bed, and curls up with his phone and does the only logical thing he can do.

He looks at the Shenanigans fan Tumblrs.

The #Elliotolas tag was something he never paid much serious attention to before, but now that he’s scrolling through it, he realizes just how _many_ people apparently ship them. There are fans asking each other whether Elliot and Nicholas still live together, or if there are any clips on YouTube of them singing a duet. There’s _fanart,_ for God’s sake. Very chaste fanart that looks like it was done on MS Paint, but _still._

Someone has even compiled a gifset of _all the times Elliot looked at Nicholas during rehearsals._ Half of these are from days Elliot doesn’t even remember, from behind-the-scenes videos Caroline must have been taking when they were deep into production. There he is, leaning over the top of the piano while Nicholas practices his solo; exchanging a smile with Nicholas as they sit on the floor leaning against the wall; laughing when Nicholas takes a swing with his prop sword and falls down. The tags on the post read _#do you see #do you see the way elliot looks at nicholas #the way his faCE LIGHTS UP #IT’S LIKE HE’S SEEING HIS WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF HIM #can they just get married already #i would get ordained just to marry them myself #dead._

_They knew,_ Elliot thinks, his head spinning and his heart pounding. A thousand strangers out there saw it before he did. That he’s actually— _oh God_ —in love. With Nicholas.

The more he thinks about it, the more it makes sense. Maybe this is why Elliot’s never really felt anything very strong about the people he’s dated or hooked up with. The reason why sometimes the very idea of dating makes him feel entirely worn out before it’s even begun; the reason why even though he’s always loved Caroline as a friend and always will, he never quite felt like their relationship was working out. Maybe all of that was because _this_ is it. This is the story he was meant to play out, the best story, and it was right under his nose all along, and he never _noticed._

Well, he’s noticed now. Knowing it, though, is one thing; figuring out what to do next is an entirely different matter.

Elliot groans and flops back onto his pillows, narrowly missing Ian Purrtis, who sleeps on his bed more often than he does Nicholas’s. “A lifetime of Rodgers and Hammerstein romances did not prepare me for this,” he says aloud.

Ian Purrtis _mrows_ scornfully.

 

\--

 

Two months go by quickly when you’re juggling work, rehearsals, songwriting, and trying to figure out how to handle all the sudden feelings for your roommate you don’t know what to do with. Before Elliot knows it, their plane tickets and Airbnb have been booked, and it’s one week before they fly out.

They celebrate their first smooth dress rehearsal at long last with scorpion bowls at the Hong Kong. It’s packed in here tonight, double-bodied all along the bar, so they squish around two of the tables in the corner underneath the TV and yell at each other over the sound of someone singing what has felt like a thirty-minute version of “Highway to Hell.” Elliot waits for Jane, who is late, because it isn’t a party without Jane, and occupies himself by slotting long straws together in an attempt to make the Uberstraw.

Finally Jane arrives, squeezing through the crowd to them with her leather jacket slung over one shoulder. “Ugh, sorry. I got held up at the door because they carded me again,” she grumbles. Nicholas moves over to make space for her, which involves him pressing even closer into Elliot’s side, which makes Elliot shiver. Jane plops into her seat, raking her fingers through her hair. “I mean, I know the whole Asians don’t raisin thing, but come on, I look at _least_ twenty-one. Anyway, what did I miss?”

“Oh, just Elliot complaining about how this is the last decent alcohol we’ll have in a while,” Hazel says. “You know, the usual.”

Elliot sniffs at his phone screen. “The drink options in Ireland are wholly unimaginative. I mean, they’re just _pints,_ it’s not impressive just because they come in bigger quantities at once.”

“He’s just upset because stouts don’t come in pink,” Kate says.

“They do not. They do, however,” Elliot adds, “have some kind of secret menu item that involves mixing blackcurrant syrup into a Guinness, which I suppose will have to suffice.”

Nicholas looks at Elliot. “Did you literally just Google the most hipster possible configuration of a Guinness?”

“Yes, I did,” Elliot says proudly.

“Group selfie!” Caroline shouts, locking one arm around Blake’s neck and gesturing for all of them to move in closer. She snaps twenty photos, and then sends all of them to the group chat, accompanied with the message _Wish you were here! Can’t wait to see you @Anna @Evan @Jonah xoxo_

“Okay, _now_ can someone do Rocky Horror with me?” Hazel demands loudly. “I have been waiting all night for at least two people to sing backup on ‘Touch-a, Touch-a.’”

“I _offered,”_ Hazel’s boyfriend says, looking miffed.

Hazel pats his hand. “Sorry, babe, but there’s a reason why you’re the writer and not a cast member. Your tone-deafness is, in a word, astounding.”

Jane laughs. “Fine, we volunteer,” she says, getting up and grabbing Kate’s hand to drag her along.    

“And I’m going to get another drink.” Nicholas starts to slide out, then stops and looks at Elliot. “Do you want anything?”

“Oh…” Elliot trails off, feeling a little like it’s hard to breathe, the way he has with increasing frequency over the past few weeks. “You know what I like,” he manages finally.

Nicholas smiles. “I do. Be right back,” he says, and goes. Elliot misses him as soon as he leaves the table.

His phone buzzes at his elbow with a message in the group chat. It’s from Jonah, which is enough to ruin the mood. _Aw! Miss you all. We’ll be reunited soon enough. xx_ “Faugh,” Elliot says.

Across the table, Caroline raises her eyebrow at him. “Okay, I could hear that archaic spelling,” she says. “What’s eating you, Heathcliff?”

“Nothing,” grouches Elliot, shoving his phone deep into his pocket.

Caroline is peering at him more closely. “You know, you _have_ been acting slightly more hysterical than usual these past few days…I can’t help but wonder if it’s at the thought of seeing Jonah again. Is this because of your rivalry thing? I thought you’d both outgrown that.”

“We do not have a rivalry thing!” Elliot throws his hands in the air. “Why does everyone think that?”

Caroline tilts her head and makes a face at him, like, _seriously?_

“The problem is,” Elliot says, annoyed, “he thinks he’s the next Jeremy Jordan. Every white male in musical theatre between the ages of twenty and thirty thinks he’s the next Jeremy Jordan.”

“Well,” Caroline says. “Not the ones who think they’re the next Aaron Tveit.”

Elliot flaps a hand at her impatiently. “The point is, he’s not better than us just because he makes 40k per episode now. I’m not looking forward to being cooped up in cramped living quarters with _that_ for a whole week.”

“I don’t think Jonah thinks he’s better than us.” Caroline’s brow creases. “Elliot, do you ever stop to consider the possibility that half the things you think are things you’ve built up in your own mind? And besides—we’re not in college anymore, you know?”

Elliot sighs. “I know.” Looking across the room, he picks Nicholas out in the crowd, and watches him lean against the bar and say something to the bartender, who laughs and nods. “Hey,” Elliot says. “If I tell you a secret, do you promise not to tell anyone?”

“No,” Caroline says.

Elliot ignores her and continues. “I think…I’m pretty sure I like Nicholas.”

“Oh.” Caroline’s eyes grow wide. _“Ohhh._ Do you know if—do you think he feels the same way?”

“I don’t know.” Elliot groans. “I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I don’t—it’s confusing. Some days it feels like what we have is such—a delicate equilibrium, you know?”

“Well, you could always seduce him,” Caroline says simply. “Especially since we’ll be lost in a foreign country next week. Wandering the rolling green hills, looking out over the misty cliffs to the ocean…if that doesn’t make one of you want to rip the other’s bodice off in front of a crackling peat fire, I don’t know what will.”

“I don’t know if I’m the seducing type.” Elliot frowns. “I’m…the performing type, there’s a difference.”

“Ah. That makes sense.” Caroline stirs her drink. “Explains why you never tried to seduce me.”

“Sorry.” Elliot winces.

“It wasn’t a guilt trip, it was a mere statement of fact.” Caroline smiles gently. “It’s all okay, Elliot. And what I meant to say is—we’ve all known each other long enough, so I think you know Nicholas is worth the risk. And if I know _you,_ which I do, I’m sure you’ll have some Cunning Plan soon enough.”

Elliot nods wordlessly.

“Hey,” Caroline says. She reaches over and covers Elliot’s hand with one of her own. “Does he make you feel special?”

Elliot nods again, momentarily unable to speak.

Caroline presses her other hand to her heart. “The two of you have always been special together,” she says, and smiles again, and Elliot loves her so, so much. “So I can’t say I’m surprised at all. Go get ‘em, tiger.”

Just then, they’re interrupted suddenly by both of their phones buzzing again. It’s a reply in the group chat—from Blake. _Can’t wait, J!_ followed by a string of all the most underused emojis, like the bullet train and the pile of money with wings, because Blake likes all the emojis to feel equally loved.

Elliot looks up toward the end of the table, where Blake is smiling faintly at his phone. And it’s in that moment that Elliot realizes: he’s not the only ship that needs help sailing.

Getting up, Elliot moves around the table and deposits himself onto the seat right next to Blake. “Oh my _God,”_ he says. “You’re in love with Jonah.”

Blake gapes at him. “I—what?”

“You are,” Elliot says triumphantly. “God, this explains so _much._ The reason why you keep bringing up his name in conversations. Why you’re always the first to reply to him in the group chat.”

“He’s—he’s one of my best friends!” Blake protests. “I am merely talking to and/or about one of my dearest, most trusted friends!”

“Why you’re still up to date on that second-tier network _Glee_ ripoff,” Elliot persists, leaning in closer. Even under the kaleidoscope of colored lights, Elliot can tell that Blake is starting to pale. “All the times in college when you volunteered to host his birthday parties at your parents’ house, or jockeyed so hard to sit next to him in World Drama, or offered to lend him some esoteric item of clothing for still-unknown purposes.”

Blake looks like he’s questioning everything he knows about himself. “Oh God. Is…is that what that is?”

Elliot lays both hands on Blake’s shoulders. “I know it’s a lot to take in,” he says gently. “Which is why I’m willing to help you.”

Blake squints. “Wait. What’s in this for you?”

Elliot’s not about to admit that he’s thinking if Jonah has his hands full of Blake on this trip, it’ll mean the rest of them—and therefore Elliot—will have to deal with Jonah a lot less. “My dear Blake,” he says sweetly. “Can’t I just want to give two of my dearest, most trusted friends the happy ending they deserve?”

“No,” Blake says.

Elliot pats Blake’s cheek reassuringly. “Just trust me,” he says. “I’m an excellent wingman. This’ll all go over like…like a hot-air balloon.”

Blake doesn’t look entirely convinced. “I don’t think that’s how that idiom goes.”

It’s then that Nicholas comes back with their drinks, and smiles that perfect smile at Elliot as he sets his on the table in front of him. “Looks like the girls are going up,” he says, as Hazel, Jane, and Kate grab their mics and mount the stage.

“This one’s for the best theatre company in the fuckin’ universe,” Hazel slurs into the mic. She points at their table. “Love you, motherfuckers,” she adds with feeling as the song begins.  

_“Whooo!”_ Caroline yells, leaping to her feet and applauding wildly. Elliot stands up and joins her, gesturing at Nicholas until he joins them too. Laughing, Nicholas claps and sways to the music, leaning into Elliot’s side, then both of them cupping their hands around their mouths to do the callouts. Onstage, Jane catches sight of them and blows them all a kiss. Elliot blows her a kiss back, and she grins and flips her mic in her hand like a pro.

Impulsively, out of sheer happiness, Elliot whips out his phone and sends out a tweet via their official account. _D-minus 7, StrangelyCon. We’re coming for you with all the shenanigans we’ve got._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter end notes added, hooray!
> 
> So er, this fic is basically a Team Starkid AU, but you don’t need to be a fan of theirs to appreciate this, I hope! I’m very much a closeted theatre kid, but nowhere near as knowledgeable as I'd like to be--and also in the past I tried to write actual Starkid RPF but produced absolutely nothing publishable. 
> 
> So when this idea came to me I was like, AHA, AT LAST I HAVE FOUND MY BERRIES, and then WAIT, CAN I, WHAT AM I EVEN DOING?!?! and now I am just trying not to have an extremely prolonged breakdown hahahaha
> 
> Chapter title from Sondheim's _Road Show_ ; also let it be known that I am writing Chapter 2 in part to the Merrily We Roll Along documentary playing in the background and hoo boy is it making me feel some kind of way.


	2. i should tell you i'm disaster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Elliot,” Blake says to his back once they’re alone in the kitchen. “I’ve had some time to think about this. I really don’t think I’m in love with Jonah.” He pauses. “But even if I were, this scheme to get us together has been horrifyingly unsubtle so far, and it’s only the first day. I have to confess, I’m a little disappointed in you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, I’m back! I consumed many (non-alcoholic) pink drinks over the writing of this chapter; I think it helped. 
> 
> Chapter title from “I Should Tell You” from _Rent,_ because I honestly had no idea what to call this one so I just rolled with it.
> 
> And here we go!

They arrive in Dublin on Monday, stumbling blearily through immigration and customs and out into the humid gray morning. After wrestling all their stuff onto the bus and making it into the suburbs, they find their Airbnb, a weathered-looking two-storey house at the end of a row.

Their host is there to let them in and give Elliot the key, and raise her eyebrows at the assortment of giant suitcases all of them wheel in through the narrow front hall. “You sure you’ll be all right, now?” she asks on her way out. “There’s tea in the cupboard, and milk and eggs and rashers in the refrigerator.”

“Everything’s perfect,” Elliot says, air-kissing her on the cheek. “Thanks, Roisin.”

“What is it you’re doing again?” Roisin asks. “It’s a panto, is it?”

“Oh, ha! God, no,” Elliot says lightly, as behind him, Blake starts unpacking the lion and unicorn onesies to hang up in the hall closet. “We’re very serious actors.”

There’s a little sunroom in addition to the living room, which is joined to the kitchen—and an upright piano next to the sofa, which pleases Elliot immensely. “Now!” he says brightly to everyone, standing in the center of the floor and pulling a sheet of paper out of his hand-carry. “I have taken it upon myself to come up with all our room assignments.”

Kate gives him a withering look. “Based on what?”

“Feng shui,” Elliot says wisely. “I have chosen a room for each of you while taking into consideration the unique abilities you’ll need to be amplified for our performance this weekend, and your orientation to the element and position of the sun that will most enhance said abilities.”

Jane gives him an even more withering look. “You know I _know_ you’re bullshitting us with this, right?”

“No, I’m not,” Elliot says. “I bought a book and everything. See?” He shows her the book.

“Ughhh,” Hazel says, covering her eyes. “Fine. Let’s just get this over with.”

“Okay. So, Evan and Anna get the foldout bed that’s in here. Jane and Caroline, you’re with me in the room at the top of the stairs.” Elliot points. “The master bedroom fits four people. so that’s for Hazel, Nicholas, Kate, and—“ Elliot squints at his list, sees where he’s just written _?????,_ and quickly mumbles, “—and the other one. And Blake, you get the small bedroom on the other end of the hall.”

“You’re forgetting someone,” Jane says dryly.

“Hmm?” Elliot says vaguely as he wanders off to inspect the kitchen, and then stops and claps a hand to his forehead. “Of course! How _could_ I have forgotten?” He turns to Blake and holds both his hands out. “Blake! Jonah can room with you!”

Blake stares. “Elliot,” he begins, but everyone else is already hauling their things up to their respective rooms.

Humming a snatch of “The Kobayashi-Maru of Love,” Elliot opens the refrigerator. There is indeed milk, and eggs and bacon, and even a whole thing of butter.

“Elliot,” Blake says to his back once they’re alone in the kitchen. “I’ve had some time to think about this. I really don’t think I’m in love with Jonah.” He pauses. “But even if I were, this scheme to get us together has been horrifyingly unsubtle so far, and it’s only the first day. I have to confess, I’m a little disappointed in you.”

“Shhh,” Elliot says over his shoulder, closing the fridge. “I am setting up the optimal conditions for the both of you to realize your true feelings. Just give it time. You’ll see.”

Blake sighs. “You owe me for this,” he says as he climbs the stairs.

“Oh, I think you’ll find that in the end, you’re the one who’ll be owing me.” Elliot fills the electric kettle with water and puts it on to boil.

“There is only _one bed in here,”_ Blake yells from the second floor.

 _“Is_ there?” Elliot yells back, grinning. “I had absolutely no idea!”

Caroline floats back down the stairs and into the sunroom, and sweeps back the curtain over the door that leads out into the tiny garden. “We have a cat!” she calls out delightedly, peering out of the glass. “Can I let him in?”

“Sure,” Elliot says, at the same time Hazel’s boyfriend shouts, “Wait, no, I don’t trust cats, they’re evil!”

Caroline opens the door, and the cat trots in slickly, curling its lip at all of them. Elliot pours it a saucer of milk, then leaves Caroline patting its head and goes to drag his stuff upstairs.

“Just what are you scheming?” Jane asks, sitting back on the bed with one leg crossed over the other, while Elliot is kicking his suitcase into the corner by his mattress on the floor. “I mean, obviously I can _tell,_ but should I be concerned any more than usual?”

“Nope,” Elliot says cheerily, scooping his clothes up and crossing to the closet. “I’ve got it all under control.”

Jane squints at him. “I can give you nothing other than the assurance that I am trying, _incredibly_ hard, to trust you.”

The doorbell rings downstairs, and Elliot yells over the pile of clothes in his arms, “Caro, sorry, can you get that? Roisin probably forgot some—” Then he hears the front door open, and a chorus of loud shrieks.

There’s a light rap on their bedroom doorframe, and Elliot looks up to see Nicholas leaning against it. “Hey,” he says with a grin. “I don’t think that’s Roisin.”

Everyone thumps downstairs to find Caroline, Anna, and Evan entangled in a group hug in the middle of the hall, their arms wrapped around each other as they jump up and down in unison. “Yay, yay, yay,” Caroline chants, squishing her cheek into Anna’s. “Evanna’s heeeeere.”

“Hey!” Evan grins and opens up one of his arms, sweeping Jane into the group hug, and the others all pile on too. “Man, it’s good to see you guys.”

“You’re crushing me,” Jane says, extracting herself from the group hug while subtly swiping at her eyes with the back of one hand.

“I made us all matching T-shirts!” Anna announces, untangling herself and already starting to unpack her suitcase in the middle of the hall. She holds up one shirt and shows them the back first, that has their tiny logo of a wardrobe with a rainbow streaming out of it—and then turns it around to show the front, on which all of their terrible headshots from freshman year are arranged in a grid like a yearbook spread, with the words _Shenanigans Class of 2017_ printed underneath. Everyone bursts into either howls of laughter or anguished screams. Elliot wears his immediately.

After they catch up over mugs of tea in the kitchen—Anna groaning about teaching at her Upper West Side preschool, and Evan sharing anecdotes from the place where he bartends, which is the kind of place where his official title is _mixologist_ —they decide to explore their neighborhood a little. They walk out and find the Tesco’s and the butcher’s shop along the main street, along with a cafe that Elliot ducks into to buy some halfway decent coffee, and a tiny pub called Madigan’s.

Caroline keeps lagging behind because she takes pictures of absolutely everything, and when she sees the elderly men in their flat tweed caps sitting in the pub already having drinks, she waves merrily at them, and they wave back. “Can I take your picture?” she asks, holding up her camera.

“What d’you want our picture for?” one of them laughs. “You should be taking a picture of Conor here, he’s the good-looking one.” He jerks his head over his shoulder at the young barman behind the counter, who makes a face. But they oblige, turning toward her on their bar stools, and Caroline snaps away.

“Where are you from?” the man asks.

“Boston! We’re here for the week,” Caroline says.

“Oh! You like music?” the other one asks.

Caroline beams. “Absolutely.”

The men both nod. “We might be having a _seisun_ Wednesday night,” the second one says. “You should come by the pub then. You can’t leave Ireland without experiencing a _seisun.”_

The first one peers around Caroline. “Are those your friends? Why don’t you all come along, Conor’ll like that.”

“Conor hasn’t shifted anyone in ages,” the second one adds in what seems like a meaningful tone. “Not since that lad from Ballina…what was his name, Conor? The one with the lovely long blond hair that you said had a tattoo on his—”

“Oh, fuck off, you two,” Conor says, laughing, and the men both chortle in response.

“We’ll be there,” Caroline promises, waving goodbye.

As they walk back to the house, Nicholas drifts to the back of the pack and lights a cigarette. Elliot falls back with him. “Remember how we talked about what smoking does to your vocal cords?” Elliot chides. “Remember all those scans of X-rays I showed you?”

Nicholas takes a drag off his cigarette. “ _Showed me_ is an understatement considering you made a mobile of them above my bed while I was asleep,” he says, grinning. “I’ll be good the rest of the week, I promise.”

“You’d better,” Elliot huffs. “If you wind up needing a vocal cord transplant, I’m not giving you mine, I need them.”

“Shame. I would have loved to have taken possession of your dulcet tones,” teases Nicholas. Then he looks around the street thoughtfully. “It’s nice here, isn’t it? Everything’s so…small and peaceful.”

Elliot nods—and then feels like he doesn’t know what to say all of a sudden, which is unusual for him. He never used to be at a loss for words with Nicholas, no matter what they were talking about; whether it was school or their families or the latest RuPaul episode. But lately they’ve been lapsing into silence more and more—and Elliot doesn’t know if they’re awkward silences, or comfortable silences just colored by the awkwardness of everything that’s tangled up inside his head, everything he can’t say.

So instead of saying anything now, Elliot tips his chin up, sticks his fingers in his mouth, and whistles. “Okay, children, double time, we’ve got rehearsing to do,” he yells, racing ahead to the house.

In the living room, Elliot has them do vocal warmups, and then leads them all in a run-through of their full company songs. Then Blake and Hazel do fine-tuning with Evan and Anna (“God, I forgot how _exhausting_ this is,” Evan moans, collapsing into a chair), while Elliot and Nicholas rehearse their two _Time Ravel_ songs at the piano, Nicholas with the cat in his lap.

 _“Do you dare to come and cause a little chaos with me?”_ Elliot sings. _“Just enough to set things right—“_

 _“My life is here,”_ Nicholas cuts in. _“Everything I know, everything that’s—“_ Then he stops. “Elliot,” he says. “You’re frowning. Is it my singing?”

“No!” Elliot says quickly. He pulls his hands back from the keys, suddenly enough to startle the cat, who leaps off the piano bench and gazes at him sourly before padding out of the room. “God, no. Sorry. I was just—I didn’t realize that was the face I was making.” Elliot rubs his eyes.

“Is it the songs?” Nicholas ducks his head a little to peer at Elliot. “Because the songs are fine, if you’re wondering. More than fine.”

“I know!” Elliot says, forcing lightness into his voice.   

Nicholas leans forward and lays his hand on Elliot’s knee, which Elliot only realizes now he’d been jiggling nervously, and he forces himself not to jump at the unexpected touch. “Hey,” Nicholas says, his voice low. “Seriously? Whatever it is—you can tell me.”

“It’s just the tea,” Elliot says, pushing down his rising panic. “I had a lot of tea earlier, it’s—“

Then there’s a knock on the front door, followed by the bell ringing. “Hello? This the right house?” a muffled voice calls from outside. “If you’re not my friends, do you know where I can find them? There’s like twenty of them, they’re really loud and frequently very inappropriate and—”

Hazel races for the door, flings it open, and throws herself bodily at the person on the other side. “Jesus fuck,” she says, pulling away in surprise. “Where did these _muscles_ come from?”

“Do I have muscles?” Jonah asks, grinning as he ducks into the front hall and looks around. “That’s strangely reassuring to hear.”

“Jonah!” everyone exclaims at the same time.

Jonah looks—so much more _Jonah_ than he ever did, somehow. Sun-kissed, celebrity, LA Jonah, with his wide, too-gracious smile, and his theatrical eyebrows, and his _undercut._ Jonah looks like he’s—attended SoulCycle classes, and switched to flexi-veganism, and gotten into the habit of having smoothies for breakfast out of one of those two-thousand-dollar blenders. He looks like he’s used the Konmari method to organize his life and started reading Malcolm Gladwell books and deadlifting for fun. He’s even wearing one of those basic-as-fuck infinity scarves, and it looks infuriatingly good on him, because Jonah is the kind of person who could find a way to make a fucking potato sack look attractive.

Elliot hangs back a little, wondering how long he can pretend not to acknowledge their newest arrival—watching out of the corner of his eye as Jonah greets everyone in turn, clasping Nicholas’s hand and pulling him in for a hug, then laughing at something Caroline whispers in his ear and kissing her on the cheek. Then Jonah looks over at Elliot, and hesitates, for just the briefest second.

Elliot takes that as his cue. “Ah,” he says. “The sellout returns.”

Jonah rolls his eyes. “Nice to see we’ve kept up the healthy friendly banter,” he says, walking up to him.

“Healthy?” Elliot assumes what he hopes is an unaffected, casual pose leaning against the piano. “Don’t lie to yourself, it eats you up inside like acid.”

Jonah laughs and half-claps, half-pats Elliot on the shoulder, the feel of his hand warm and strange through his sleeve. “It’s good to see you. Truly,” Jonah says, and keeps smiling—and Elliot remembers now, what it was like having Jonah around before. The way he has of drawing all the energy in the room towards him, like a black hole in outer space.

“The band’s back together!” Caroline cheers.

Jonah turns and picks up his things. “Where am I sleeping? I don’t mind anywhere, I’ll take the floor if I have to.”

“I believe you’re rooming with Blake,” Jane says, amused. But Jonah just says, “Gotcha,” and heads for the stairs.

Hazel climbs the stairs alongside Jonah. “So remember the last time we Skyped, I told you about the anthology film thing I’m contributing to?” she says excitedly. “My screenplay got approved! There’s a part for a vlogger, who would ideally just have to record videos of themselves talking to the camera, nothing fancy, and I was wondering—“

“Hurry _up,_ Jonahzel, you can do your catching up over drinks,” Kate calls after them.

Nicholas scratches the cat behind the ears. “Don’t wait up for us, Cillian Meowphy,” he says, taking his blazer off the back of the sofa.

Cillian Meowphy huffs, splays out in the middle of the floor, and goes straight to sleep.

 

The eleven of them troop back down the street (Blake has produced a bowler hat from somewhere, and keeps it clapped firmly on his head while he twirls his umbrella in his other hand), and squeeze into Madigan’s, which is full of the evening crowd now. Conor the barman is joking with some of the other patrons, and gives them a wave when he sees them come in. Then he seems to catch sight of Jonah, and stops polishing the glass in his hand, looking suddenly flustered.

“Hey, how are you?” Conor clears his throat as they go up to the counter. “Erm…what can I get you?”

“Do you serve red wine in this establishment?” Jonah asks. His eyes are half-lidded; he’s practically _purring._ God, can’t he go five minutes without flirting with someone?

“’Course, yeah,” Conor says, a little too quickly. “We just have it in these little screwtop bottles, though, it’s—it’s nothing fancy.”

“That’s perfect,” Jonah says, beaming. “One of those for me, then.”

Elliot slides his elbow onto the counter in front of Jonah, props his chin up on his fist, and says, “Conor, my man. Can I trouble you for a blackcurrant Guinness?”

Conor looks confused. “A what?”

“A Guinness with blackcurrant syrup in it,” Elliot explains patiently, making a stirring motion with his finger.

“We just have Guinness. I can do you one of them,” Conor says, looking slightly annoyed now. So after the others order, Elliot takes his sad, non-blackcurrant-infused Guinness back to their long table along the wall underneath the framed horse pictures.

Elliot’s forgotten, too, what it’s like to be so hyperaware of someone else’s presence. Even without looking, without _trying,_ it’s like Elliot can sense where Jonah is or what he’s doing at all times, radiating his overwhelmingly preposterous Jonahness. It’s like the world’s absolute worst superpower.

By way of masterful weaving, dodging, and nudging, however, Elliot does manage to get both Blake and Jane between himself and Jonah, with Blake directly next to Jonah as an added bonus. Silently congratulating himself, Elliot relaxes a little as a staff member sets down their plates of beef stew and fish and chips, while Jonah plies them all with stories from on set.

“My agent’s trying to see if she can get me a part in an indie movie, or some Netflix drama if anyone’s looking,” Jonah says. “To _broaden my appeal,_ I believe is how she put it.”

“Does your appeal really need broadening, though?” Elliot chinhands with his elbows on his thighs.

Jonah tilts his head at Elliot. “You tell me, I suppose,” he says, with that same amused tone that he used earlier, that makes Elliot think Jonah must just always be laughing at him, and Elliot angrily vows to himself to never ask Jonah anything ever again.

“Well, the dating rumors certainly abound,” Hazel says, smirking. “Wasn’t there that tabloid article claiming you were seen leaving a club with Zachary Quinto?”

“I don’t think I’m nearly established enough for anyone to take those seriously.” Jonah laughs, waving her off. “Maybe when I get a Taylor Swift dating rumor, I’ll know I’ve made it.” Jonah pauses, then adds, “And Zach honestly just needed help getting an Uber to his hotel, we parted ways like five minutes after that,” and everyone groans, and Elliot rolls his eyes because of course Jonah just loves burying the lede.

“Hey, what happened to that play you were planning on auditioning for?” Nicholas asks.

Jonah makes a face. “Rehearsals would have clashed with our shooting schedule. It’s too bad; I really would have liked to go for it.”

Elliot realizes he has no idea what they’re talking about—and then realizes that this means somehow, Nicholas has kept up communication with Jonah, and Elliot didn’t know about it. In his distracted state, Elliot accidentally picks up Nicholas’s drink from the table instead of his own and takes a sip. It’s some kind of cider that is complicated and fruity and Swedish, and in spite of everything Elliot has room to appreciate it.

“Hey,” Jane murmurs in his ear. Elliot looks at her. “You’re glowering. Do I need to remind you to play nice?”

“I’m not glowering,” Elliot glowers, and continues to drink Nicholas’s drink.

The group conversation shifts and splinters off into smaller group conversations, and then a couple of people get up for refills, and there’s shuffling around the table to let them step out—so it takes Elliot a second to realize Jonah’s gaze is fixed on him now. “So, how’s…everything?” Jonah asks. “How’s work?”

“Work is work,” Elliot says evasively. Jonah is sitting there watching him and just—glittering at him, like a vampire, except probably not _at him_ specifically, because glitter is just Jonah’s default state. Elliot wonders if it’s possible to ask him to turn it down a notch.

“He’s very good at his job,” Jane adds. “When he isn’t sending the interns into a wild panic with all his cryptic instructions, that is.”

“You know who else is good at his job?” Elliot asks suddenly, clapping his hands together. “Blake! Blake, tell Jonah about the one-man production of _Sure Thing_ you put on at Speakeasy.”

“Oh, that?” Blake asks, the picture of modesty to anyone who didn’t know Blake. “That was nothing.”

“No, I think I saw the pictures on Facebook!” Jonah says. “That set design was inspired. I loved that you used so many…iPads.”

Blake beams. “In addition to Ives’ original intent, I wanted to make a statement about how social media and technology have affected even the way we relate to one another offline,” he says.

Evan’s brow wrinkles. “Wait, _Sure Thing_ is…it’s the one about the date, right?”

“Technically, a meet-cute,” Blake says, waving his hand. “For lack of a better term.”

“You did a one-man play,” Evan says slowly, “about two people having a meet-cute.”

“Evan, Evan, Evan. It was part of the _statement,”_ Blake says. “About how digital communication makes it easier for us to project ourselves onto the objects of our desire, naturally.”

“Oh. Naturally,” Evan echoes, while still looking confused.

“I also replaced the sound of the bell with the Windows XP error sound,” Blake says with pride.

Jonah nods contemplatively, and he and Blake chat a little more about postmodern theatre, and Elliot thinks that everything is going swimmingly. But then Jonah turns to Nicholas. “And you’re at the childcare center, right?” he asks. “Are you still going into drama therapy?”

“Mmm,” Nicholas says as he leans back in his seat. “That’s the plan, but—not for a while, I guess.”

“What’s stopping you?” Jonah asks, tilting his head. And that, that gets Elliot’s hackles up, because if there’s anything he hates it’s people who insinuate that Nicholas isn’t doing enough or that he’s wasting his time, and seriously, _fuck_ the implication that whatever Nicholas chooses to do isn’t worthwhile.

And Elliot would have said exactly that, but Nicholas replies matter-of-factly, “Well, the best MA program for it is at NYU, and I’m not sure I’m ready to move over there just yet. Someday, though,” he adds. “If they’ll have me.”

“Any school would be stupid not to take you,” Jonah says simply—which softens Elliot’s feelings towards him, but only by the tiniest, most begrudging smidge. Then Jonah exclaims, “I almost forgot!” and turns back to Elliot. “Elliot! How’s _Time Ravel?”_

“Oh. I suppose Hazel told you about it,” Elliot grumbles.

Jonah laughs. “It’s definitely unconventional, even for Shenanigans, but—with you three behind the wheel, I’d expect nothing less.”

“Us three,” Elliot repeats. “Meaning…me, Hazel, and…”

Jonah blinks. “And Tim?”

“And Tim,” Elliot says. “Yes. Of course.”

“I _heard that,”_ Hazel’s boyfriend yells from the other end of the table.

Jonah leans forward. “Well, I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing on the musical side of this whirlwind romance… Hazel showed me some of the script, I think it’s fascinating.”

The thing is, because of a recent script rewrite, Hazel and Elliot have just realized they don’t at all agree on how _Time Ravel_ is supposed to end. Elliot thinks Sebastien and the Mysterious Man should still have their happy ending and time-warp off into the Antarctic non-sunset together. But the new ending Hazel wants is much less clear; she wants it to end with them having acquired all eight documents and using them to save New Antarctica—and then the Mysterious Man leaving to set things right elsewhere, with Sebastien remaining behind in the bookshop.

(“Hazel,” Elliot told her. “Are you familiar with the saying, _begin as you mean to go on?_ Because that’s what I did, and you’ve just _changed_ the destination to which I thought I was heading. I need to reconsider all of these songs now in order to lead up to it. I may even have to change the leitmotifs!” He was fairly spluttering at this point. “And even just from a narrative perspective—why would we _do_ that? The fans will feel robbed. I mean, just because they get a happy ending doesn’t mean it won’t be earned.”

“No, I know that,” Hazel told him. “But look, who’s to say this isn’t a happy ending? Or I guess I mean, that this is the _right_ one? Sebastian is needed here, at the start of this new age; the Mysterious Man is needed elsewhere. It makes sense. And they’re not saying goodbye forever, they’re saying they’ll see each other again someday.”

“But then it’s like nothing’s changed,” Elliot said in disbelief. “They’re still both going to be where they were before, that’s—it’s a cop-out.”

“No, it isn’t,” Hazel insisted. _“Everything’s_ changed. It’s hopeful.” Then she sighed and said, “Look, Elliot, I trusted you on the romance thing, and you were right. That was the right call. But you have to trust me on this now, okay? And besides, if our fans want closure, or more adventures, then—all they have to do is write fic, or draw fanart, or just come up with a new ending inside their heads. And you know they will. I mean, when have you ever said no to something that’ll encourage fan engagement?”)

So with this impasse, Elliot hasn’t really been able to work on anything new for _Time Ravel—_ especially on what he had been hoping would be the big dramatic love song for the finale. But all he says to Jonah now, in the airiest voice he can manage, is, “Oh, it’s coming along. Evan’s been helping me with the sound mixing remotely. I’m weaving together a few different styles, to reflect the different eras they travel to…some operatic stuff, some rock. I was also inspired by what Imogen Heap did with the _Cursed Child_ score, so Caroline is doing vocalizations for the overture.”

“Well. You never were anything if not ambitious.” Jonah smiles faintly. “But I have faith in you.”

The others come back with their drinks, and then Anna excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Evan watches her leave, and as soon as she’s out of earshot, he says, “Guys, huddle,” and gestures them all closer.

“So this is sensitive information I didn’t want to send over email,” Evan continues as they all lean over the table towards him. “But I need your help. Because there is, um, something very expensive and very engagement ring-shaped currently hidden in the pocket of my suitcase.”

“Holy _shit,”_ Caroline says, thumping the table with her fist. “Fuck! I _knew_ it!” Her smile is a mile wide.

“Evan, that’s amazing,” Jonah says enthusiastically.

“Congratulations,” Nicholas says, smiling at Evan, then at Elliot. About a year ago, they’d all lowkey been worried Evan and Anna weren’t going to make it. Elliot and Nicholas talked about it extensively back then (though Nicholas had drawn the line at placing actual bets, in spite of the very organized spreadsheet Elliot had come up with for that purpose). So this definitely, definitely counts as good news.

“Well, she hasn’t said yes yet,” Evan says, and looks at Elliot too. “So I require a very special set of skills,” he adds, grinning.

Elliot fistbumps him. “I got you, bro.”

“We’ll do whatever you need,” Hazel says, punching Evan on the shoulder.

Anna comes back from the bathroom then, and they all do their best to rearrange their faces and not look conspicuous. “What are we all smiling about?” Anna asks, plopping down next to Evan.

“We just remembered that swans can be gay,” Caroline supplies promptly without missing a beat.

Anna looks overcome with emotion. “They _can_ be gay!” she says delightedly, and then they all start talking about swans and penguins and other birds that have exhibited documented gay behavior. 

Nicholas is looking at Elliot now. “You finished my drink,” he says in an odd, soft voice.

“Oh.” Elliot looks down at the bottle in his hand. “I…did, didn’t I,” he says, and then is acutely aware of the fact that his mouth was just on something Nicholas’s mouth has been on. He leaps to his feet, willing his face not to burn. “No worries, I’ll just—get you another. The same, or…?”

Nicholas smiles and gives a little shrug. “Surprise me,” he says, his eyes dark and bright all at once, and Elliot feels that flare of warmth he’s come to associate with Nicholas deep inside his chest.

It’s all going to work out, Elliot thinks with satisfaction as he heads back to the bar—glancing back over his shoulder at Anna, who’s leaning contentedly against Evan and laughing at something Jane said. It really is. He’ll write the best songs he’s ever written for _Time Ravel,_ and they’re going to put on one hell of a show at the con, and then they’ll help Evan pull off the proposal of the century. This week is going to go perfect.    

 

\--

 

Tuesday is for proper sightseeing around the city, so Hazel wakes everyone up in the morning with eggs and bacon, and Elliot makes coffee and struggles to make toast in the toaster which, for some reason, does not pop up automatically.

“Remind me again,” Jane mutters into her mug of coffee, “why we elected Hazelliot as our official trip planners. It’s what, seven AM?”

“Oh, you’ll love it,” Elliot assures her, scooping Cillian Meowphy up in his arms and cuddling him. Cillian yowls and wriggles in protest. “Today is for being gloriously touristy. We’ve picked out all the absolute best things to do.” He and Hazel exchange a high-five.

Blake and Jonah come down the stairs together, already laughing about something, which genuinely surprises Elliot. “Hey,” Jonah says, grinning at everyone. “Morning.”

“Good morning,” Elliot says cautiously, squinting. 

Hazel’s boyfriend is flipping through the slices of toast on the plate. “Elliot, all of these are burnt.”

“Oh, the toaster doesn’t pop up automatically,” Elliot says.

Hazel’s boyfriend looks steadily at him. “One would think,” he says, “that a person who learned this after burning the first two slices, would then know to watch the toaster so that they didn’t burn the rest.”

Elliot sighs wistfully and strokes Cillian Meowphy’s head. “Technology is so unpredictable.”

After breakfast, they all assemble in the front yard, and while Caroline has an impromptu photoshoot with Jane in her new white leather jacket and oversized shades with white frames, Elliot stands on the step and announces, “Good morning, everyone! Just a reminder before we set off: on this trip, to ensure everyone’s safety, we will be using the buddy system.”

“Have you pre-assigned our buddies, too?” Jane asks knowingly, raising one eyebrow.

“Jane.” Elliot laughs as if Jane is being incredibly silly. “I am many, many things, but I’m not a _dictator._ No, you are all free to select your own buddy,” he says generously. “Why, it can be whoever just so happens to be standing next to you right now, if you like.”

Jonah and Blake, who are standing next to each other, look at each other and shrug. “Cool,” Jonah says.

Caroline links arms happily with Jane, while Hazel immediately abandons her boyfriend in favor of forming the group of three with Kate and Anna, leaving the boyfriend and Evan to glance at each other helplessly. “Excellent,” Elliot says, turning—and then finding himself face-to-face with Nicholas.

“Hey there, partner.” Nicholas smiles and holds out his hand, and Elliot’s heart does a tiny lurch.

Taking Nicholas’s hand, Elliot hops off the step. “So,” Nicholas says, “where to first?”

They hop onto a bus that takes them into the city center, where they duck through the narrow doorway of Trinity College and step through into the front square. Lampposts line walkways past stately old stone buildings, that tower high above them, and tourists mill around taking pictures and huddling together in the brisk fall air.

“Can you imagine if we’d studied here, oh, a hundred years ago?” Elliot says as they cross the cobblestones, pointing up at the little windows lining one of the old residence halls that overlook the square. “We’d have shared tiny garret-like rooms up there—except we’d have totally transformed them and filled them with, with marble busts and Flemish paintings, and fresh strawberries and bottles of wine and a pianoforte.”

“Half of us would have rowed for the school team, and the other half would have joined the dramatics society and played original compositions in the senior common room that shocked all the stuffy old academics,” Caroline agrees.

“Did they still have duels back then?” Blake wonders. “We could have had duels. With swords.”

“Who would be dueling whom?” Anna asks, frowning.

“Oh, believe me,” Hazel says dryly. “At least two of us would have found something to duel about.”

Caroline breaks out her selfie stick so they can take a picture in front of the bell tower, and then they all get in the queue to see the Book of Kells and the Long Room. While they do, Elliot uses his phone to take pictures of the others for Twitter, so the fans can see what they’re up to. He snaps one of Hazel, Anna, and Kate doing an aloof three-Heathers pose, and then he takes a selfie with Nicholas, with Caroline and Jane peeking between their heads.

“So, the Blake and Jonah thing,” Nicholas says, as the line slowly snakes forward. “Is it proceeding according to your satisfaction?”

“Shush, not so _loud,”_ Elliot hisses. “You need to refer to them by their codename. You have to say _Jake,_ as in Jonah/Blake.”

“You know, if we use that one enough, people are going to think Jake is an extra member of Shenanigans,” Nicholas remarks. “Like how everyone thought there was a One Direction member called Larry.”

“And you think I don’t love that? It only adds to the ineffable mystique of Jake.” Elliot sneaks a backward glance at Jonah and Blake, who are at the tail end of their group. Blake appears to be telling a story that involves flailing like a car dealership balloon man, and Jonah is nodding attentively. “Actually, now that you ask,” Elliot mutters, “I have to say I’m suspicious that _Jake_ is already going so well.”

Nicholas laughs. “When are you ever suspicious of one of your schemes going well?”

“I’m suspicious when my interference is barely needed,” Elliot says out of the corner of his mouth. “I haven’t even arranged for the two of them to take a horse-drawn carriage ride around the park together yet, and they’re already being inordinately chummy.”

“You really think everyone could stand to benefit from a little interference from you, don’t you,” Nicholas says, in his amused-at-Elliot voice.

“Well, obviously,” Elliot huffs.

Nicholas just laughs again and bumps Elliot’s shoulder with his. “Come on, Miss Woodhouse, stop your fretting and just let them be. They’re friends, remember? Just let them be—friendly.”

“Fine, fine.” But Elliot is still squinting surreptitiously at Jonah and Blake, and it’s at that second that Jonah, still smiling at something Blake said, briefly glances away, and sees Elliot. And then it’s like Jonah’s eyes just—slide over Elliot, the smile still lingering on his face, and then Jonah looks off into the distance somewhere, as if Elliot were no more important than a parking meter or a fire hydrant.

And that makes Elliot annoyed, for some reason. And then he’s annoyed at himself for being annoyed, because it’s not like he needs attention from Jonah. But really, if you’re going to ignore someone, Elliot thinks grouchily to himself—there’s no need to be so _rude_ about it.

The line moves, and they all file into the darkened museum and through the exhibit, circling the room to look at artifacts like smaller copies of bound manuscripts and leather satchels and sheets of vellum. Elliot is most fascinated by the illuminations, while Nicholas reads everything, and then stops to study the text printed on one wall in particular.

“It says the scribes who handwrote these manuscripts often put their own little additions in the margins.” Nicholas points. “Sometimes translations, sometimes drawings…sometimes random thoughts, like _my hand hurts,_ or _I’m out of ink.”_

“Ha, look. This one guy was supposed to be copying out the letters of Saint Paul, but instead he wrote an entire long poem about his cat,” Elliot says, studying a magnified scan of the manuscript page on the wall. “Why didn’t I think of that? I could have written an entire musical about Ian Purrtis ages ago.”

“So, like _Cats_ but the only cat is Ian Purrtis,” Caroline says.

“Exactly. Just call me T.S. Elliot.” Elliot makes a note of it on his phone.

Nicholas looks pensive. “It’s kind of amazing,” he says quietly after a while. “On the edges of whatever great story they were supposed to be telling—they were telling their own, however mundane, in bits and pieces. And now this is like—getting to see behind the curtain. Remembering that everything we study in history now was made by human beings. Realizing that even after centuries and centuries, human nature is pretty much the same.”

“That was lovely, Nicholas,” Jane says. “You should wax poetic more often.” Nicholas makes a face at her.

Elliot hums. “You think centuries from now, people will find all the evidence that we lived and just be like, _what the hell were these kids smoking?”_

“Oh, for sure. They’ll print our group chat logs in the history books, and speculate wildly about our romantic histories with one another,” Caroline says.

Hazel shoots an amused look at Elliot. “What they won’t find, unfortunately, is your sheet music. Imagine, all your toiling lost to the annals of time just because you don’t write your songs down properly.”

“My genius,” Elliot says haughtily, “cannot be confined to the page.”

The tour group moves along, and they enter the smaller, more hushed room that houses the Book of Kells in a glass and steel case, peering close to the surface to look at the intricately drawn animals and the fine flecks of gold surrounding the drop cap letters. Then they climb a staircase and go through a doorway that opens up into the Long Room, the massive library with the vaulted ceiling and two floors containing shelves upon shelves of old books. It looks like something straight out of a fantasy novel; Hazel looks like she’s going to explode with sheer excitement.

“This is…pretty magical,” Nicholas murmurs, turning around and craning his head up to look at the second-storey bookshelves. As beautiful as the library is, Elliot stops looking around and just—looks at Nicholas, because he loves seeing Nicholas enchanted by something. He wants Nicholas to _always_ be this enchanted.

Suddenly wildly glad they decided to come here, Elliot quietly takes a picture of Nicholas without him noticing—not for the fans, just to remember. Nicholas, framed in the autumn light from the windows; head tipped back slightly to look up at the ceiling, glasses at the end of his nose and hands in his pockets, a gentle, wondering smile on his face.

And this, Elliot thinks, gazing at the photo for as long as he’ll allow himself, before tucking his phone away. This, what he’s feeling right now—this is the one that people throughout history have tried, over and over, to put into words. This is the one that people write songs about.

 

The rest of the morning and early afternoon is full of traipsing about various castles and cathedrals around the city; Hazel entertains them all with trivia on the Normans, and Caroline and Elliot take enough photos to fill several albums, and Blake declaims bits of _Ulysses_ as they walk. After a late lunch at an elegant little café atop a lifestyle store (Elliot’s choice, naturally), they explore Merrion Square looking for the statue of Oscar Wilde.

Eventually they find Oscar reclining up on a rock in one corner of the park, one leg crooked artfully and the other splayed out in front of him, wearing a green and pink smoking jacket and smirking down at them. “You know, he kind of reminds me of someone,” Evan says, looking sideways at Blake.

“Who?” Blake asks, blinking.

“Oh, just someone I know,” Evan replies, deadpan, while Anna and Kate hide their snickers behind their hands.

“I’m surprised people don’t kiss it,” Jonah remarks, tilting his head up at the statue. “You know, like they do his grave in Pere Lachaise.”

Caroline rummages around in her purse, and then pulls out a tube of red lipstick. “Want to be the first?” she asks, uncapping it and holding it out to Jonah with a mischievous grin.

Jonah laughs, and takes the lipstick—and then to Elliot’s surprise, Jonah turns and offers it to him. “You want to go first?” he asks.

Elliot stares. “What—me?”

“Didn’t you have that brief phase when you were obsessed with Oscar Wilde and his epicurean predilections?” Jonah grins loftily at him. “After we did those _Gross Indecency_ exercises in Acting II?”

It’s true, and Elliot’s both surprised and somewhat peeved that Jonah remembered it. But Elliot does have a deep respect for Oscar Wilde, and is not about to pass this up, and certainly not about to turn down what feels like a challenge.

So Elliot plucks the lipstick out of Jonah’s hand, and applies a single neat coat using Jane’s sunglasses as a mirror. Then he stands back and considers how he’s going to reach the statue; the rock is elevated considerably off the ground, and is fairly steep with no handholds.

Evan coughs. “Do you, uh, need a boost?”

“Nope!” Elliot steps back even further—and then he makes a dash for it, and leaps. His hands touch rock, and he pushes himself up, just high enough to quickly press his lips to the cold surface of Oscar’s knee before falling back to the ground.

Everyone applauds wildly. Elliot beams at his work, the lipstick stamped clearly on the stone—then turns to Nicholas, who immediately chokes back a laugh. “What?” Elliot asks, frowning.

“You have—“ Nicholas gestures at the corner of his own mouth, and Elliot realizes the lipstick must have smudged on his face, or something.

And then there’s a brief second where Nicholas starts to reach out his hand, as if to touch Elliot’s face and wipe the lipstick away with his thumb—and just the beginning of the gesture sets all of Elliot’s senses on high alert. He can feel his eyes grow wide, and he sucks in his breath—

And then he hears someone shout, “Oi, what’re you doing over there?” and they all whirl to see a park caretaker making his way down the path toward them.

Normally, Elliot would be one hundred percent confident about sweet-talking their way out of a confrontation with a surly older authority figure. But caught off-guard like this, he feels very not-charming and completely incapable of thinking. So instead Elliot says, _“Fuck,”_ grabs the edge of Nicholas’s sleeve, yelps “Everyone get your buddy and _run,”_ and takes off out of the park gate and down the street with Nicholas in tow.

Everyone runs. “We are literally _too old_ to still be doing shit like this,” Hazel’s boyfriend pants as they round the corner and merge into the safety of a gaggle of tourists.

As the afternoon wears on, they circle back and stroll down the busy Grafton Street, along which people are busking with guitars or keyboards and looper pedals. “Our dinner reservation isn’t until seven,” Hazel says, checking her watch. “We can split up to shop for a while.”

So they do; Caroline happily empties her pockets of coins into all the hats and guitar cases lying open on the sidewalk, while Blake wanders off into an Aran sweater shop, musing aloud to Evan and Anna over whether he should grow a beard. There’s a fancy pipe and tobacco specialist’s on the corner, where Elliot purchases a briar wood pipe with a classic brown finish.

“Weren’t you denouncing the evils of smoking to Nicholas just yesterday?” Jane asks.

“Who said anything about me smoking it?” Elliot asks, waving his new pipe expressively. “I’m just going to hold it in my hand. The affect without the act.”

Jane laughs. “How John Green of you,” she says, turning her own lit cigarette over in her hand.

They pass a girl playing an Irish song on the electric violin, and two spray-painted men in hats and coats who are being living statues. Then Caroline stops in front of a colorful window display and says, “Ooh, a Disney Store! Can we go in for like, five minutes?”

“We have a Disney Store back home,” Nicholas points out.

“But look, this one has Christmas ornaments, and they’re fifty percent off,” Caroline says, and none of them can argue with that.

“I stopped trusting Disney ever since they started buying out literally every other major film studio on the planet,” Elliot says as they enter the store, glaring at the life-size Captain America statue. “The only thing I’ll give them right now is that Prince Hans’s dress sense was impeccable.”

“But you can’t like Prince _Hans,”_ says a small girl next to him, sounding thoroughly scandalized. “He’s the bad guy.”

“I didn’t say Prince Hans wasn’t the bad guy,” Elliot tells her, frowning. “I said I admired his sense of aesthetic. The man knows how to rock a pair of epaulettes, that deserves appreciation.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the girl insists, frowning back up at him. “You can’t like the bad guy just because of how they look.”

“Well, who’s _your_ favorite _Frozen_ character?” Elliot retorts.

“Olaf,” the girl replies promptly.

Elliot snorts and lifts the end of his pipe to his mouth. “Shows what you know about aesthetics.”

The girl looks darkly at him and then walks away.

“Yeah, okay, there’s definitely a reason why Nicholas is the one who works with children and not you,” Caroline says.

Just then, “Friend Like Me” from _Aladdin_ starts playing over the store sound system. Almost without thinking, Elliot picks up a Genie plush toy from a nearby bin and dandles it toward Caroline. _“Well, Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherazade had a thousand tales,”_ he sings along, and suddenly realizes that he still remembers all the words to this. He turns to Nicholas, grinning, and points at him. _“But master, you’re in luck, ‘cause up your sleeve, you’ve got a brand of magic never fails.”_

“Oh dear,” Nicholas says, a grin spreading across his face.

Elliot tosses the plush back into the bin. _“See, all you gotta do is rub that lamp, and I’ll say—Mister Aladdin, sir, what will your pleasure be,”_ he sings, and holy God, how did he never notice the sexual undertones in this song before? He keeps singing though, aware that Caroline is taking a video. He’s also aware strangers are starting to watch, but that only emboldens him further. _“Let me take your order, jot it down, you ain’t never had a friend like me!”_

Elliot leaps up onto one of the store’s little elevated platforms, flipping a plastic lightsaber up into his hands to use as a cane as he dances. After months of rehearsal, he’s almost forgotten what a breath of fresh air it is just to sing something off the cuff and have fun with it. He’s singing for the crowd, but mostly for his friends—but especially for Nicholas, who he glances at every now and then to gauge his reaction. Nicholas is leaning back against a shelf, shaking his head and laughing, his face lit up and open—and the sight sends a warm thrill through Elliot’s body.

The song reaches the final chorus, and Elliot jumps off the platform. _“You ain’t never—“_ He twirls Caroline under his arm, and Caroline bursts out laughing. _“Had a—“_ He holds his hands out to Jane, and they do a quick Charleston. _“Friend—like—“_ But where the Genie belts the note, Elliot leans in close to Nicholas’s ear and whispers, _“Me.”_

The song ends, and the entire store bursts into applause. Elliot takes his bows.

“Does he work here?” one of the employees asks.

“Nope,” another employee replies, then yells at Elliot, “Hey, do you want to work here?”

“Sorry,” Elliot says breathlessly, grinning and starting to make his exit. “I already have my hands full just managing these guys. We’re doing a concert on Saturday, though!” he calls through the door just before they leave, waving merrily. “Come see us at the CCD!”

“You’re ridiculous,” Nicholas says, still laughing and looking incredibly fond as they step back out into the street.

And then Jonah, who was apparently standing at the doorway the whole time, falls into step with them as they walk back to find the others. “Trust you to turn absolutely anything into a show,” he says to Elliot, a smile quirking at the edge of his mouth.

“Says the person who had an impromptu Sesame Street singalong in the Hollywood and Western Jamba Juice that went viral,” Elliot retorts, before he can stop himself.

Jonah’s eyebrows go up. “You saw that?”

“Everyone in the world with a Twitter account saw that,” Elliot grumbles, not sure how to feel about Jonah paying attention to him again. The man seriously needs to make up his mind.

 

The table they reserved for dinner is at Yamamori Izakaya, a bar that serves sushi in the basement and has a live DJ playing an endless stream of deep house. There are moving projections of horses splashed over the walls, and there’s sake and cocktails and vending machines in the back that carry a wide assortment of Japanese beers. After dinner, people start getting up and dancing in the middle of the floor, and their group disperses here and there; Caroline is dancing with Blake, and Hazel is dancing with Jonah, and Evan and Hazel’s boyfriend are parked at the other end of the table drinking sake and yelling about sports.

Elliot winds up sitting across from Anna, both of them leaning over the table and talking over the pulse of the music. “Rollercoasters that go upside down,” Anna says thoughtfully, refilling both their sake cups.

Elliot nods. _“The Swing_ by Fragonard,” he replies.

“Oh, that one’s gorgeous,” Anna agrees. “You can almost smell the air in it, can’t you? And that dress.” She thinks. “Pancakes,” she says next.

“Not waffles?”

“Nope. Pancakes.”

“Hmmm.” Elliot takes a warm sip of sake, letting it sear its way down his throat. “Marble planters.”

“Ooh, fairy lights,” Anna says. “Just any kind of fairy lights.”

Nicholas comes back to their table then, grinning and flushed. “What are we talking about?” he asks, resting his hands on Elliot’s chair back.

“We’re taking turns talking about some of our favorite things.” Elliot tips his head back to look at Nicholas, who smiles down at him.

“Sunflowers!” Anna yells. “I love sunflowers!”

Jane comes bounding back next with one arm slung around Kate’s shoulders, but she lets go of Kate as soon as she sees Elliot and throws her arms around him instead. “I have drinken,” she tells him. “Drunken? I have past-participled many drinks.” Elliot pats her comfortingly on the back.

“Okay, I need you to future-participle some water now.” Nicholas gently takes Jane by the shoulders and sets her down on the bench next to Anna, pushing a glass of water toward her.

“Fine, _Dad,”_ Jane says, taking the glass. “And there is no future participle in English,” she informs him, drinking the water before settling against Anna’s shoulder and closing her eyes.

Elliot watches his best friend fondly, and then looks back up at Nicholas. “You tired, or do you wanna dance one more?”

Nicholas laughs, drawing the back of his hand over his forehead. “If I say yes, do I get an encore performance of earlier?”

“Ha. That particular show was one afternoon and one afternoon only.” Elliot feels his heartbeat speed up.

Nicholas shrugs. “Guess I’ll take what I can get, then,” he says, his eyes twinkling.

Elliot stands, and the two of them make their way onto the dance floor and find space in the sea of bodies. Elliot is buzzed and loose and happy, bopping to the music, and Nicholas is letting go and swaying, eyes closed in bliss. 

Then the music morphs into something more synth-pop and slow, with a crackling snare and bass that sounds like a steady heartbeat. The crowd shifts, and Nicholas reaches out and steers Elliot out of someone’s path, pulling him slightly closer.

Elliot blinks at the contact, Nicholas’s hand on his upper arm. “So I was…thinking about our origin story again,” he says.   

“Ah,” Nicholas says. He tilts his head. “What about it?”

“Just—how it could have gone a million different ways, I guess. I mean, what if I’d taken a different route to class that morning? What if you’d gotten there ten minutes later because you had to stop and rescue a stray kitten in the road? What if neither of us even liked corn dogs?” Elliot sucks in his breath. “We wouldn’t have met.”

“We still would have met in class,” Nicholas points out.

“Yeah, but we wouldn’t _already_ have been friends when we saw each other in class.”

“You mean you wouldn’t have passionately shouted my name across the lecture hall and vaulted over five rows of seats to reach me, scaring half the other freshmen in the process.”

“Exactly. See? That day we met, that made all the difference.”

Nicholas laughs, the deep notes of it like the thread of a song Elliot’s known all his life. They’ve moved even closer to each other now, Elliot having to tip his head back to meet Nicholas’s gaze, tiny webs of neon light flickering all around them—and Nicholas’s hair is damp, and Elliot wants with a sudden fierceness to reach up and brush it away from his forehead. And then he realizes they’re not dancing anymore—they’re just looking at each other, watching each other breathe. The laughter fades slowly from Nicholas’s face, replaced by a question Elliot doesn’t understand.  

The bass is pounding inside Elliot’s head, all his nerves snapping with energy. He tries to swallow and can’t. Colored lights are glinting off Nicholas’s glasses, and behind them his eyes are impossibly dark.

“Elliot,” Nicholas whispers. Elliot can’t even hear his voice over the music, but he knows the shape of his own name on Nicholas’s lips.

And it hits Elliot, suddenly, in a knife-sharp burst of clarity—how absolutely terrifying it is to have someone to see you for who you really are; for anyone to know anyone as much as Nicholas knows him. He feels like a small wild animal that’s been cornered in its den, and Nicholas is the hunter, standing at the entrance. And Nicholas could lay his weapons down and tame him. Nicholas could take him apart and cut his heart out of his chest. And no matter which it is, no matter what he does next—all Elliot knows is he wants it. He wants all of it.

“I—“ His sentence stutters and dies in his throat, and Elliot blinks and finds his eyes are hot. And to his horror he realizes he’s actually blinking back _tears,_ and he can’t do this in front of Nicholas right now, he can’t start fucking _crying_ and have Nicholas ask him what’s wrong, because then he’d have to tell him the truth—but he can’t say it now, but he can’t _not_ say it either, and it’s all too much, he can’t, he _can’t._

So Elliot staggers backward, with a little gasp, and chokes out, “I—I’m just—going to get some water.”

“Elliot,” Nicholas says. His expression has changed again, his brow creased, his voice urgent and questioning.

“I’m fine,” Elliot says—and as soon as he says it, he’s able to put a convincing smile on his face, and he _knows_ it’s convincing because he is a _good actor,_ goddammit. “It’s just hot in here, and all these people, and the—I’ll be back.”

And he knows for certain that he’s a fucking good actor, because Nicholas looks like he believes him, and he murmurs “okay,” and he lets Elliot go.

 _What the fuck, what the fuck,_ Elliot chants at himself as he pushes through the crowd. He’s struggling to get his breath back as he stumbles up the stairs and to the bar, gripping the edge of the counter. He inhales, filling his lungs with air.  _You're a coward,_ he thinks savagely to himself. 

And then Elliot gets something that’s definitely not water, and then goes back downstairs and finds Caroline and dances with her. And then Caroline pulls Nicholas in to dance too, and then Jonah drifts over and dances with all of them. Elliot stops caring. He loses himself in the sea of movement and lets the music drown out everything—the thoughts chasing themselves in circles in his head, the rapidfire of his own heartbeat, until he feels nothing at all.

At some point someone realizes how late it is, and after collecting each other they all pack up and leave the bar and go walking back along the Liffey river that cuts through the middle of the city—the cool night wind rippling past them, the strains of “Champagne Supernova” and “Fast Car” floating out from the pubs they pass. The buddy system forgotten, everyone walks in random, unsteady tangles, and somehow Elliot winds up on one side of Jonah, with Nicholas on the other.

“I honestly don’t think I’ve had this much to drink since our roommate days.” Nicholas exhales and tips his head back to breathe in the night air, exposing the gleaming line of his throat to the lamplight.

“You mean that one time you pre-gamed so hard to _13_ you got weirdly sentimental, and then just fell asleep on the couch and wound up not going out with us?” Jonah says.

"Yeah, yeah," Nicholas says. "Laugh it up."

Elliot laughs. “I remember that. That was sweet.” Nicholas makes a little sound of acknowledgment without looking at him.

“Seriously, I’m falling asleep on my feet here,” Jonah says muzzily. “Can we do something to stay awake? Play Fuck Marry Kill or something?”

“No, let’s do Two Truths and a Lie,” Elliot says. His mind feels dully, pleasantly blank, and he squints up at the half-moon, a bright wedge in the black sky.

“Okay,” Jonah says gamely. “Who wants to go first? Nicholas?”

“Sure.” Nicholas thinks for a moment. “A, when I was little I wanted to be a veterinarian, but only for bears. B, I have a red belt in karate and I can break a board with a turning kick. And C, my first celebrity crush was Jeremy Irons.”

“B,” Elliot says. “B is the lie.”

“No, I think it’s C,” Jonah says.

“It’s C,” Nicholas confirms. “My first celebrity crush was Jeremy Brett.” Jonah laughs.

“What the hell?” Elliot looks over at Nicholas, surprised. “You have a red belt in karate?”

“I was in high school. I stopped pretty soon after that.” Nicholas shrugs, and for some reason there’s an uncomfortable twist in the pit of Elliot’s stomach. “You go, Jonah,” Nicholas says after a moment.

“Okay. Huh. A, I got in trouble in middle school for using too much pomade on picture day. B, Michael Cerveris is my favorite Sweeney Todd,” Jonah says. “And C, I’ve never eaten an avocado.”

“You’ve never eaten an avocado?” Nicholas asks, at the same time Elliot stops and says incredulously, _“Michael Cerveris?”_

Jonah shrugs noncommitally.

“Well, obviously, B is the lie,” Elliot huffs. “Cerveris can’t be your favorite Sweeney. That’s like saying Nick Jonas was your favorite Marius.”

“Hey, don’t drag Nick into this,” Jonah protests.

“No, he’s right, I’ve heard this before,” Nicholas says. “Michael Cerveris is just a poor man’s Victor Garber; Michael Cerveris is either a copycat taking on roles that Victor Garber already played perfectly, or taking roles that should have gone to Victor Garber in the first place, including Sweeney _and_ Thomas Andrews in the _Titanic_ musical, et cetera, et cetera. It was like, the first thing the two of you realized you agreed on after _months_ of you squabbling in freshman year.”

“Oh.” Elliot tries to think back to freshman year, but he can’t remember that at all. He’s too exhausted to think about anything.

They cross the river, over a bridge that has both handrails covered in padlocks of all shapes and sizes; _love locks,_ Elliot thinks dazedly, like the ones on the Pont des Artes. “Hey, remember our lock?” Jonah asks suddenly.

“Oh, yeah,” Elliot murmurs. They’d all done it as a company at the end of junior year, after the success of _Narnia;_ they’d written their initials on a padlock, snapped it onto the fence of the Mass Ave bridge, and thrown the key into the river. “I wonder if it’s still there…they cut some of them off once because they were worried they were going to weigh the fence down too much, or something.”

“Maybe we should do another one, then,” Jonah says. Elliot glances sideways at him, but Jonah’s looking off across the river, silent now. In the moonlight, Jonah’s pale skin seems lit from within, and his hair looks almost silver. His expression is strange and faraway, like there’s something he’s trying to remember.

In front of them, Blake stops walking and sits down on the sidewalk. “I can’t walk one more step,” he states simply. “If you make me walk one more step, my legs are going to fall off.”

So they manage to hail three cabs, and Elliot crawls into the backseat of the one that pulls up closest to them and gives the driver their address, and then drifts into a foggy, uneven sleep. The ride home is a blur of streetlights and tires rumbling over bumps in the road and the sensation of warm, slightly scratchy fabric against his cheek. And when Elliot wakes again, they’re pulling up in front of the house, and he’s pressed into Jonah’s side—and it’s only getting out of the cab that he realizes Nicholas didn’t ride in their cab with them, that he must have gotten into a different one, because there he is, already standing at the gate.

And as he somehow makes it through the door and upstairs and falls into bed, what washes over Elliot is a haze of images—Nicholas laughing, Nicholas’s eyes in the half-light; Nicholas reaching out to touch his cheek, his mouth, Nicholas whispering his name—and Elliot doesn’t know anymore, is the last thing he thinks before he sinks back into sleep, which parts of it he wanted so badly he must have dreamed them, and which parts of it were actually real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on locations and things in case anyone was interested: 
> 
> The bougie café above the lifestyle store where they have lunch is [Avoca](https://www.tripadvisor.com.ph/Restaurant_Review-g186605-d2335461-Reviews-Avoca-Dublin_County_Dublin.html). The fancy tobacconist’s where Elliot buys his pipe is [Peterson’s](https://www.tripadvisor.com.ph/Attraction_Review-g186605-d189604-Reviews-Peterson_of_Dublin-Dublin_County_Dublin.html). The Oscar Wilde statue in Merrion Square looks like [this](https://irishamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/IMG_0444.jpg), and his smoking jacket is apparently carved out of real jade, and from the look on his face you can tell he is impossibly smug about it. (I did not kiss the statue while I was there, but you can be sure I thought about it. Mostly I couldn’t reach it because I’m short.)
> 
> Everything at [Yamamori Izakaya](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR5iXU228sM) is real, including the projections of the horses on the walls. I spent several happy nights there having 20-euro sushi and attempting to prevent my friends from making bad decisions.
> 
> There are SO MANY pubs named Madigan’s in Dublin and they are all independent of each other, so the Madigan’s here isn’t based on any particular one. (You will also be hard-pressed to find a pub with live music where someone doesn’t sing “Champagne Supernova” at least once before the night is over.)
> 
> PHEW this was a long one but thank you for reading! We're halfway there! 8D


	3. something that's this plain to see

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Maybe Kate doesn’t need your suggestions,” Elliot says testily. Next to him, Kate is looking from him to Jonah and back in a slight panic. “Maybe Kate just wants to riff however she wants without having a backseat director give her notes.” 
> 
> Jonah folds his arms. “As I recall, I’m not the one with the long and storied history of backseat directing,” he says calmly, and Elliot suddenly deeply regrets the fact that he’s not the kind of person who starts fights by punching people in the nose.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I remember a time long, long ago when I was young and foolish and thought “this fic will probably not be longer than 15k,” and now I just look at the Word doc that I have now had to split into two separate Word docs so I won’t have to scroll past the first 70 pages just to get to the part I am currently writing, and I laugh and I laugh
> 
> Chapter title from “Obvious,” a cut song from _Dear Evan Hansen._
> 
> Also, belated happy birthday, Celeste! I love you and I’m sorry for scaring you with my voice messages but mostly I’m sorry for this

Elliot wakes feeling like he’s being dredged up out of deep water, and someone’s arm is flopped over his neck, their leg across his knees. It takes him a minute to open his eyes, and another to realize that the person starfished out in the bed next to him is Caroline, snoring lightly, her face lost somewhere in her hair. Vaguely, he remembers crashing into the bed last night, and Caroline grumbling at him to move over and yanking a pillow out from under his head before bunking down beside him. Elliot also remembers, all too well, that Caroline always winds up sleeping spread-eagled like this, hilariously ungracefully in sharp contrast to what she’s like when she’s awake.

His mouth is dry. Carefully, Elliot peels Caroline’s arm away and gets out of bed, squinting in the faint sunlight filtering into the room, then almost tripping over the pile that he thinks might be Hazel and Kate on his mattress on the floor.

Apparently no one fell asleep where they were supposed to; Blake is curled up neatly on the living room sofa, and as Elliot enters the sunroom on his way to the kitchen, he sees Evan and Anna are squashed up on either side of Hazel’s boyfriend like he’s their giant teddy bear. (The social media manager part of his brain makes a note to take a picture of that, before they wake up.)

Jane is awake and already dressed, sitting on one of the high kitchen stools with a mug in hand. Cillian Meowphy is perched on the table next to her, and she’s gingerly running her other hand over his spine. Someone else has the refrigerator open and is rustling around in it, and the kitchen is full of the earthy smell of coffee.

Elliot’s head is throbbing. “Hey,” he says. Or at least that’s what he meant to say, because it comes out kind of like “Heuhgghhh.”

Jane looks up at him, and Cillian leaps off the table and starts winding around Elliot’s ankles. “Hey,” she says. “You definitely look like you need coffee.”

“Coffee would be…great.” Elliot blows his breath out in a long exhale.

The person in front of the refrigerator closes it—and all of a sudden Elliot is confronted with the sight of Nicholas standing there, wearing pajama pants and a loose shirt, in the middle of a kitchen that suddenly feels too small, as though the walls around them have shrunk. The memory of last night comes rushing over Elliot again in uneven waves—the dance floor, shadows and light, Nicholas’s hand on his arm, Nicholas on the walk home barely saying a word—and Elliot’s insides seize up with panic.

Elliot opens his mouth, and says hoarsely, “Morning.”

And Nicholas is looking back at him steadily. Not smiling, not frowning, just—looking at him.  “Good morning,” he says quietly.

Elliot nods. “So,” he says, because it feels like he should say something, except his mind is completely, utterly empty.

“Do you want—“ Nicholas makes a vague gesture at the coffee maker.

“Yeah,” Elliot says, maybe too quickly—aware that Jane is looking at him out of the corner of her eye, not thinking about how Jane has always been able to read him like a book. “Yes. Please.”

Then Elliot starts to reach for the cupboard where the mugs are, at the exact same time Nicholas picks a clean mug off the countertop and holds it out to him. The gesture confuses Elliot, makes the wires cross in his brain, and his hand stutters over the cupboard handle for a moment before he’s able to stop himself and turn and take the mug from Nicholas.

“Thanks,” Elliot says, his voice sounding strained even to his own ears.

Nicholas kind of nods, and then he seems like he doesn’t know what to do with himself, but he’s still not breaking Elliot’s gaze. The looking stretches out into an infinity; Elliot is suddenly aware of his other arm hanging down at his side like a lead weight, and the way his mouth is kind of dropped half-open. He feels stiff, and slow, and he can’t—stop _staring_ at Nicholas, because the expression on his face is—he’s never seen Nicholas look quite like this before, somehow gentle and puzzled and just a little bit guarded, all at the same time.

Jane coughs delicately. “Something’s burning,” she says.

“Shit.” Nicholas dives for the toaster.

“It, uh, doesn’t pop up automatically,” Elliot offers lamely. Nicholas lifts the burnt slices of toast out carefully by the corners and drops them onto a plate without a word. He fiddles with the plate and the toaster, and doesn’t turn around.

Elliot watches his back in silence. Why does everything about this make him feel like he’s still asleep? Like they’ve been transported into some absurdist film; like this is all just a bizarre dream he can’t shake off, instead of real life?

It’s this moment that Jonah chooses to enter the kitchen, yawning and rolling his shoulders. “Oh, thank God,” he says, and makes a beeline straight for the coffee maker. He pours himself a mug and then rests both hands on the counter, leaning against it and sighing before chuckling softly. “Some night,” he says, and looks up at Elliot, a grin forming.

It’s suddenly all too much for Elliot to bear. He can’t be here, trapped in this tiny room—with Jane probably reading his mind even if she’s pretending not to be, and Nicholas either looking at him too much or not enough, and Jonah being too much himself. He wants to scream.

Jane slides off her stool and asks quietly, “Hey, Nicholas, what fruit did you want? The supermarket’s probably open by now.”

“Oh, just—whatever you think the others will like to go with breakfast,” Nicholas says, at the same time Elliot blurts out, “No, Jane, it’s okay, I’ll go.”

Jane blinks at Elliot. “You…sure?”

“Yeah, I mean I’m—already dressed,” Elliot says, looking down at himself, because he is; he didn’t change out of his clothes last night.

Nicholas seems to hesitate, then says, “Wear a jacket, it’s a little cold out today.”

“Yeah,” Elliot mumbles, and sets his empty unused mug down on the counter and turns and escapes into the front hall. He grabs someone’s jacket off the hook by the door, he doesn’t know whose—jams his arms into it, and pushes out into the cool gray morning.

Head down, Elliot makes his way out to the main street, pounding down the sidewalk and feeling his boots thud against the ground with every step. The wall of noise in his head is growing, but he can’t focus too hard on what it’s saying; can’t make himself untangle the threads of last night’s confusion to figure out what all of it might mean, otherwise he’ll explode. He just has to keep moving.

In the Tesco, Elliot grabs a basket, and then spends ten minutes just standing in front of the fruits and vegetables before realizing that’s what he’s been doing, and that he hasn’t gotten anything. So he picks up plastic cartons of strawberries and blueberries at random and throws them into his basket, and then a little bag of apples and a bunch of bananas, and then goes wandering around the rest of the supermarket staring at bran cereal and laundry detergent, not knowing what the hell he’s looking for.

He and Nicholas have never been like this, he thinks; and what breaks through the numbness is something closer to anger. Even the few times they fought in the past, they were quick to lose their tempers at each other and quick to make up, so much so that they barely even call them fights. This awkward hesitation, now—this isn’t _them._

Elliot refuses to allow himself to imagine what Nicholas might be thinking when he looks at him. But then he realizes he left Nicholas back at the house with Jane and Jonah, and the three of them are probably standing around in the kitchen talking about what’s up with Elliot right this very minute.

Fighting down the rising sick feeling in his stomach, Elliot automaton-walks to the checkout line and dumps the contents of his basket onto the conveyor belt. It’s only then that he realizes the bag he picked up that he thought was apples is actually a bag of onions, but he’s completely incapable of going back and getting actual apples or really doing anything about it right now. So Elliot pays for the fruit and the onions and leaves the supermarket, feeling the cold like a slap in the face as soon as the doors slide open. He doesn’t know that he wants to go back yet—but also he can’t stop his feet from moving somehow, left-right, left-right left-right, until he’s standing in front of their door again, his hand hovering over the latch.

Elliot closes his eyes, and forces himself to breathe, and opens the door.

Some of the others are up now, too; Hazel’s sitting at the breakfast table in the sunroom with Jonah, the two of them having a conversation in low tones. Evan is sitting straight up in bed, his hair on end, staring blearily into space as though he’s trying to figure out who he is and how he got here, while next to him Anna and Hazel’s boyfriend are still slumbering on obliviously. Jane is still in the kitchen, busy cooking—bacon and scrambled eggs, by the look of it. Nicholas isn’t anywhere in sight, but Elliot can hear the shower running upstairs.

Elliot moves into the kitchen and tries to be as quiet as possible and stay out of Jane’s line of sight as he hunts around for something to put the fruit in. He finally digs up some kind of lumpy, oddly-shaped glass bowl, which he thinks could pass for avant-garde tableware instead of just what is clearly a badly-blown dish—and sets the bananas in the middle and surrounds them with heaps of berries in his best attempt at artful plating, which is pretty impressive considering his raging headache.

Across the kitchen, Jane stops stirring the eggs and turns to look at him. “Hey,” she says. “You—“

Elliot holds up the bowl of fruit. “I got the fruit,” he says. “I’m just going to—put it on the table.”

Jane blinks. “You,” she says, “you bought a lot of onions.” 

“They’re for…later,” Elliot says evasively.

“Elliot, are you okay?” Jane takes a step toward him. “Did something happen last night?”

“No,” Elliot says, not knowing how to begin to explain what happened last night. “Do you—need help with anything else?”

“I’ve got this covered,” Jane says, gesturing to the frying pans. She seems like she’s starting to say something else, but then she stops, and Elliot takes the opportunity to hightail it out of the kitchen. He sets the fruit bowl in the middle of the breakfast table with a clatter, startling Hazel and Jonah. “Fruit,” he informs them helpfully, pointing at the fruit, and then he makes his way into the living room and collapses onto the piano bench.

_Breathe._ Elliot needs more of a distraction than this. So he checks his messages on his phone—all his emails, all his Tumblrs, and he even checks his fucking Slack even though he’s on leave. And then he makes the stupid decision to check Twitter, which turns out to be the _worst_ fucking thing he could have done because there are hundreds of notifications from fans, retweeting and commenting on their photos from yesterday, including the selfie he took with Nicholas, and it doesn’t take too many guesses to figure out what all the heart emojis they’re spamming it with mean.

_“Fuck,”_ Elliot says, dropping his phone onto the closed piano lid.

On the sofa, Blake pops up and squeaks, “What?”

“Nothing.” Elliot mashes his knuckles into his eyes. _Breathe._ Then behind him, someone comes down the stairs, and Elliot feels the weight of the footfalls, the length of the strides approaching the living room—and knows them, would know them anywhere.

“Breakfast,” Nicholas says from the doorway behind him. He taps on the doorframe twice with the palm of his hand, pauses a moment, and then Elliot feels him leave.

Everyone else has woken up and trickled downstairs by now, so they all sit around the sunroom table, some with their eyes still half-closed. For a long while, none of them speak, and they pass the bacon and eggs and coffee and have breakfast in total silence.

“Well, that was fun,” Evan says finally, and they all laugh helplessly then, relaxing and sagging into each other or onto the table.

Hazel’s boyfriend passes his hand over his face. “Jesus. We’re really not in college anymore.”

“You can say that again.” Hazel stabs a strawberry with her fork. “Thank God tech rehearsal’s in the afternoon.”

Nicholas rises from his chair, stretching a little, and Elliot decidedly does not pay attention to the way the hem of his shirt rides up from his waist. “Does anyone want hot tea? I can put the kettle on.”

“Yes, please,” Caroline says, and Jane pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes and nods too.

Then Nicholas looks at Elliot. His hair is still damp from the shower, and Elliot feels his throat tighten, remembering how much he wanted to run his fingers through Nicholas’s hair last night. “Do you want tea?” Nicholas asks softly.

Elliot shakes his head. “I’m good,” he croaks. Nicholas nods, and then scoops up Jane and Caroline’s mugs and disappears into the kitchen.

And Elliot aches, seeing Nicholas go, being in the same room as him and feeling him navigate the space around him—and feeling like everything’s been turned inside out, feeling completely unable to reach out to Nicholas at all.

But there’s nothing he can do now, other than get to work. So Elliot rustles up a fresh sheet of paper and a pen and plugs his earphones into his keyboard, and sits down to write the _Time Ravel_ finale, scribbling lines and crossing them out and rewriting them unsparingly—until two hours later the sheet of paper is an illegible mess, and he’s left with nothing more than a handful of scattered measures and the frustrating, sinking feeling that he’s even farther away from finishing this song than he was when he started.

 

After lunch they make it across town to the convention center, and Cliona, the con organizer Elliot’s been in touch with, meets them in the lobby. “It’s so lovely to meet all of you!” she says, shaking their hands. “I’m a huge fan, my flatmates and I used to have Shenanigans watch parties all the time in college.” Then she turns to Jonah and says, “And I love _Still Waiting,_ of course.”

“You’re too kind,” Jonah says, smiling sunnily and not looking hungover in the least.

Cliona tours them around the building, shows them the talent lounge and the hall where their Q&A and signing will be held, and then to the stage. “All yours,” she says after introducing them to the crew members. “I’ll just be setting up downstairs; if you need anything give me a shout.”

Even in their exhaustion, they know their routines so well by now that they can get ready for their runthrough like officers going to their battle stations. Jane and Hazel talk to the lighting and sound people, while Elliot sets up his keyboard and moves the mic stands into place. He tries not to follow with his eyes as Nicholas helps Anna and Blake carry the costumes and props backstage. Finally, everyone gets into position, and they start their runthrough.

They’ve only just finished their first group number when Jonah says, “Hold on, can we try the last chorus again? The phrasing has to be kind of like—“ He claps his hands to the beat, and then sings, _“To boldly go_ —one, two, three, _bam—WHERE no one’s gone before,_ you don’t ease into it, you have to hit the _where_ harder.”

“Right, right,” Hazel says, nodding.

“And then Kate,” Jonah says, turning to her. “For your solo—sorry, could you break the riff down, just really quickly so I can hear?”  

“Wait, what was wrong with the way Kate sang?” Elliot frowns. “It sounded great to me.”

“It sounded great to me too, Elliot,” Jonah says, and there’s something about the way he says his name right then that feels unbelievably, needlessly patronizing. “I just thought I would make a suggestion.”

“Maybe Kate doesn’t need your suggestions,” Elliot says testily. Next to him, Kate is looking from him to Jonah and back in a slight panic. “Maybe Kate just wants to riff however she wants without having a backseat director give her notes.”

Jonah folds his arms. “As I recall, I’m not the one with the long and storied history of backseat directing,” he says calmly, and Elliot suddenly deeply regrets the fact that he’s not the kind of person who starts fights by punching people in the nose.

_“Guys,”_ Caroline says, quietly but firmly. “Come on, stop bickering.”

Elliot forces himself to stop gritting his teeth, and looks at Jonah and nods grudgingly. Jonah gives him a cool nod back.

“I…really don’t mind getting notes,” Kate offers nervously. Jonah seems to come back to himself then, and gives Kate what seems like a grateful smile, and proceeds to break down her riff with her while Elliot looks off into the distance and pointedly ignores him.

The rehearsal goes on, and soon enough they get to the _Time Ravel_ songs—so Elliot steps behind the keyboard while Nicholas moves one of the mic stands over. Elliot can feel his whole body tense as Nicholas gets into place, and he shakes his wrists out furiously before placing his hands on the keyboard and starting to play.

It doesn’t take long, though, before Elliot feels like something’s wrong. Nicholas is singing the song perfectly, in the sense that he knows all the words and he’s hitting all the notes—but something’s missing. His voice is as quiet and painfully lovely as ever, but he’s clearly holding back; he might as well be singing a computer manual. None of the raw emotion—the bewilderment, the curiosity, the quiet, tightly controlled want—that Nicholas always lends Sebastien is there.

_Stop overthinking this,_ Elliot orders himself. Nicholas is tired; he’s just conserving his voice—

Then Elliot accidentally hits the wrong chord, and it somehow starts an entire chain reaction of wrong chords that he doesn’t know how to stop playing, and suddenly Elliot can’t even remember which measure he’s supposed to be at. “Shit,” he says, stopping. “Sorry, sorry.”

“It’s okay. Let’s just—take it from the top,” Nicholas says quietly. Elliot swallows, and nods, and they do.

And everything’s more or less fine again until they rehearse “Kobayashi-Maru,” because right after that Jonah says, “Wait, aren’t the lyrics at the end of the first verse _for new frontiers we yearn, we—go on this new journey?”_

Elliot bristles, feeling a spike of annoyance go through him again. “No, everyone kept getting tongue-tied with what you wrote, so we changed it to _with love as our buoyage, this could be our voyage_.” Then he mutters under his breath, “which you’d know if you watched the final show videos.”

He’s not sure if he actually meant for Jonah to hear him or not, but Jonah heard, because he looks sharply at him and says, “Hey. What exactly are you trying to say?”

“Nothing,” Elliot replies shortly. “Forget about it.”

“No, please.” Jonah’s jaw is tense. “Enlighten me. Are you saying I don’t care enough?”

“No, you obviously _care,”_ Elliot says. “You care too much, about all the wrong things, because that’s how out of touch with Shenanigans you are.”

“I can’t help having been _away,_ Elliot,” Jonah says, and there it is again, that fucking condescension. “But I took a whole week off just to be here, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, and I suppose you want a fucking Kids’ Choice Award for _that,_ too,” Elliot snaps.

“Hey!” Hazel yells, storming between them and glaring furiously. “Both of you, _back off.”_

Elliot looks around and realizes everyone else is staring at them in shocked silence, then awkwardly trying to busy themselves with other things in order to stop staring. “I know we’re all tired,” Hazel continues. She massages her temples. “But we can’t let ourselves break down like this. Everyone take five. Take like, twenty. And you two,” she says, pointing at Elliot and Jonah, “Go cool off, and go work out your weird rivalry thing—“

Elliot starts to protest, “We don’t have a—“

Hazel cuts him off with a hand in his face. “Go work it out, and I don’t want to see you come back in here unless it’s together, holding hands and singing ‘Lean On Me.’ Got it?”

Elliot’s cheeks are burning. “Fine,” he snarls, and stalks off the stage and out the door.  

Jonah finds him sitting on the floor outside the con hall, scrolling through Twitter and responding to fan questions. “Elliot,” Jonah says, no trace of spite or aloofness in his voice anymore. “I’m sorry. You were right, I was wasting time and being nitpicky. I won’t do it again, I promise.”

Elliot makes a grumbling noise under his breath and retweets a fan drawing of Ian Purrtis.

Jonah sighs. “Come on, get up from there.” Then he leans forward and extends his hand, _literally_ extends his hand like they’re going to do a peace handshake and he’s going to pull Elliot to his feet.

Elliot stares up at him. Somehow it’s worse that Jonah is trying to make an earnest apology. He wishes Jonah were being petty and broody and mean, so he’d have something to still be justifiably angry about. But he knows better than to really expect that; Jonah has always been a perfectly mature adult. Elliot ignores Jonah’s hand and gets to his feet himself, and then says, somewhat grudgingly, “I’m sorry too. For being—“ He casts around for a word he’s willing to describe himself with and comes up with, “difficult.”

Jonah nods, and lowers his hand slowly. “Look—is everything okay? You seem…I don’t know, agitated.”

For a second, Elliot is actually tempted to confide in him. But he pockets his phone and says, “It’s just—been a long day.” He exhales. “I’ll be fine.”

They both make their way back to the door of the hall, and Jonah pauses just in front of it. “I think we’re supposed to hold hands now,” he says, turning to Elliot with a tiny, playful smirk.

Elliot rolls his eyes at him. “We’re already reconciled, don’t push it,” he says, and opens the door.

 

The rest of rehearsal goes smoothly enough, but as much as they all try to keep their spirits up, towards the end their weariness really starts to sink in, and the ride home is suffused with a gloomy silence. Back at the house, they dump all their stuff in the living room and then just sort of flop sadly around onto the sofas and chairs and the floor.

After half an hour of this, Caroline pleads, “Come on, gang, let’s not end tonight on this note. Why don’t we go down to the pub?”

“Oh my God,” Kate says, at the same time Blake shrills, “Please, _no more alcohol.”_

“We don’t have to drink!” Caroline says quickly. “We can just…get bangers and mash, and sit and listen to the old people talk about their grandchildren, and unwind for an hour or two. Please?”

So they do—but when they reach Madigan’s, they’re surprised to find a very different scene from Monday night. A group of patrons is seated along the long wall, and they’re all playing traditional music—on fiddle and guitar and banjo and even a small hand drum. Everyone in the pub is listening, some of them stomping and clapping along.

“It’s the _seisun_ tonight,” Caroline says, looking around in delighted amazement. “I forgot.”

The two old men from the other day, one of whom is on a banjo and the other playing the accordion, are among the musicians, and they wave Caroline over when they see her. Elliot and the others follow and find places to sit; their host Roisin is there too, with an older woman she introduces as her sister.

The music is so cheerful and full of spirit and warmth and laughter, that in spite of everything, Elliot can’t help but start to relax and feel more at ease. Then the musicians start playing songs that have words to them, and almost everyone in the pub starts singing along, and it’s not long before they pick up the words to the choruses and start singing along too.

The old man on the banjo, whose name is Eoghan, sings out, _“We were halfway there when the rain came down—“_

_“On the day-i-ay-i-AY!”_ everyone roars.

_“And she took me up to her flat downtown on a grand soft day-i-ay!”_

Clapping along, Elliot feels the grin spreading across his face—and looking around at his friends, he’s happy to see all of them looking happy again; Hazel curled into her boyfriend’s side, Evan and Anna sharing a plate of chips and elbowing each other playfully, Caroline sandwiched between Blake and Jane, pink-cheeked and laughing.

Then Elliot catches sight of Nicholas, who is smiling and clapping along too. And then their eyes meet, and Nicholas turns that smile on him, and for one brief, perfect second it feels like everything’s okay again. Then Nicholas’s smile softens, just a fraction, into something less certain—probably imperceptible to anyone but Elliot, but he feels it like a stab to the heart.

Feeling himself flush, Elliot looks away. Across the room, he can see Jonah at the counter talking to Conor the barman; Jonah says something that makes Conor laugh bashfully and nod, and Jonah laughs brightly too, the sound of it unmistakable even through the music.

“No bringing the bartender home,” Elliot says through his teeth as soon as Jonah gets back to the table. “We don’t have room in the house.”

Jonah regards him with a lofty grin. “And if the bartender has ample room in his own house?”

“Oh, you…” Elliot trails off, annoyed. “Do what you want, then.”

Jonah nudges him a little. _“Elliot,”_ he says. “I’m joking.”

Somehow, that annoys Elliot more.

The current song ends, and then Eoghan lowers his banjo and announces to the pub, “All right, I think it’s the Americans’ turn, don’t you, lads?”

“Wait, us?” Blake says.

“Sure,” Eoghan says, and the others call out their assent. “Roisin says you’re musicians yourselves. What’ve you got for us?”

“How do you feel about Hozier?” Hazel asks.

“Oh, he’s an arsehole, but his music’s not bad,” the guitar player jokes, and the others cackle.

So Hazel blows them all away with an a cappella rendition of “From Eden,” and when she’s finished everyone in the pub cheers and whistles for her. Then Caroline leans over and whispers something in Jane’s ear, and Jane makes a face at her, but then turns to the guitar player and asks, “Do you know any Fleetwood Mac?”, and that’s how Jane and Caroline wind up singing a sweetly heartbreaking duet of “Landslide” that gets everyone teary-eyed.

“Your turn,” Jane tells Nicholas, plopping back down beside him and tucking her hair back behind her ears.

Nicholas stops clapping for her and frowns. “Oh, I—don’t really know what to sing,” he says.

Everyone boos loudly. “Liar,” Hazel says, throwing a crisp at him.

“Ow, okay, okay.” Nicholas thinks, and then holds his hand out to ask for the guitar. “I’m a little rusty, so bear with me,” he says, fitting the guitar into his lap and strumming a few chords experimentally. And then his strumming picks up, gains rhythm and shape and color—and then Nicholas starts to sing U2’s “All I Want Is You.”

_“You say you’ll give me eyes in the moon of blindness, a river in the time of dryness, a harbor in the tempest,”_ Nicholas sings softly. _“And all the promises we break, from the cradle to the grave—when all I want is you.”_

_This,_ Elliot thinks, watching him. This is what Nicholas sounds like when he’s singing with his whole heart in it. Just hearing it again feels like the first rain after a long drought, and Elliot closes his eyes, just listening, trying to hold onto it.

Then on the very last verse, Nicholas does something unusual, and changes the lyrics. _“You say you’re scared your love’s still not enough,”_ he sings, looking down at the guitar. _“That I’ll go when the going’s rough. But we’re made of stronger stuff. For all the promises we break, there’ll be new ones that we make—and all I want is you.”_ Nicholas hums along quietly as he strums the last chords out, and then he lets the reverberations fade, and looks up at everyone. blinking from behind his glasses.

The pub is completely silent. “Jesus,” the guitar player says finally.

“Sorry.” Nicholas looks embarrassed and hands the guitar back.

“What the hell,” Caroline says, as everyone emerges from their stupor and starts clapping. _“Nicholas._ That was beautiful. A beautiful act of sacrilege. When did you come up with that last part?”

“Oh, just…” Nicholas polishes his glasses on the hem of his shirt. “I was tossing it around in my head for a while, I guess.”

Blake says thickly, “Fuck, I think I need a drink now,” and gets up and heads for the bar.

Jane gets up too, lighter in hand, and like a reflex Elliot catches her wrist. “Nodes,” he says warningly.

Jane sighs a little. “It’s been a long day,” she says. “I deserve this. Back in five minutes.” Then she flicks his forehead with a finger and gives him a small smile, and Elliot relents and lets her go.

Forcing himself to work up the courage to speak, Elliot finally looks at Nicholas across the table and says, “That really was beautiful,” even as he feels his heart twist.

Nicholas smiles at him, and for some reason it seems a little sad. “Thank you,” he says. And then Blake ducks back and says fervently, “Nicholas, I don’t care if you didn’t want to drink tonight, I need to buy you a drink so I can feel like this was an equivalent exchange,” and he grabs Nicholas by the hand and hauls him off to the bar too.

“Your friend’s a keeper,” Roisin tells Elliot, patting the back of his hand.

Elliot nods, watching Nicholas’s back as he crosses the room. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “He is.”

It’s Blake’s turn to sing next, and after downing a shot of whiskey he convinces Kate to sing a Drew Gasparini song with him, and that gets them started on showtunes. Evan sings “I Turned the Corner,” and Anna joins him on the last chorus, her voice warbly and sweet, with Evan looking completely smitten the entire time—and at the end Evan pulls Anna in and kisses her, and everyone whoops for them.

And then it’s Jonah’s turn, and he stands in the center of the floor and says, charmingly as ever, “So those were all incredibly tough acts to follow, but I’ll do my best.” And then Jonah starts singing “Finishing the Hat,” and there might as well be a spotlight shining down on him from the ceiling.

Of course Jonah’s voice is perfect on this song, Elliot thinks; strong and clear as a bell, even as he plays out all the wistfulness and regret and conflict and passion in it. Jonah hits the first part where the song really opens up, and his voice takes off and soars. _“And how you’re always turning back too late, from the grass or the stick or the dog or the light,”_ he sings, his eyes blazing. _“And how the kind of woman willing to wait’s not the one that you want to find waiting—“_

And Elliot remembers, suddenly, that this was a song that he and Jonah bonded over when they first started living together. That when one of them needed to lock themselves in their bedroom to write a song of their own, they’d say _nobody bother me, I’ve got a hat to finish._ Then after they’d emerged hours later, they’d play it on the keyboard in the living room, and the other one would sit listening and then say something like, _needs a velvet lining,_ or _needs a wider brim._ Nicholas always said he never understood their metaphors, and claimed they were both just making it up and pretending—but Elliot and Jonah did always understand what the other meant, somehow. How did Elliot forget that?

_“And when the woman that you wanted goes, you can say to yourself, well, I give what I give,”_ Jonah sings. _“But the woman who won’t wait for you knows, that however you live, there’s a part of you—always standing by, mapping out the sky.”_

Elliot waits for him to sing the last few lines, to belt out that final, defiant _where there never was a hat—_ but to his surprise and confusion, Jonah lets the song end there instead, on that wistful, soft note, and just smiles at everyone and says, “Thank you.” Everyone in the pub bursts into applause, and it’s only then that Elliot realizes he was holding his breath.

Jonah bows with a flourish, which makes all the older women say _ohhh_ and _awww._ “Thank you so much,” he says again, smiling graciously, one hand over his heart. Then he gestures to Elliot and says, “I believe my friend Elliot is the only one who hasn’t performed for us yet.”

Elliot stands, and crosses the floor to take Jonah’s place. Originally, he’d been planning to sing something from _Cabaret—_ either “I Don’t Care Much,” or even “Maybe This Time.” But on impulse, instead Elliot says, “This is a song my friends and I performed for—the first big project we worked on together in college. I’ve never actually sung it before, but I’ll do my best.” He clears his throat, takes a deep breath, and starts to sing.

The song is from _Narnia,_ one called “Things Never Happen”; it’s one of the more serious songs in the show, the one Mr. Tumnus sings to Lucy at the end just before they say goodbye. Even though he never had to sing it himself, Elliot still knows all the words by heart. _“Things never happen the same way twice. You can’t open a door that’s already been locked,”_ he sings. _“But remember, dear Lucy, the adventures you’ve had—and all the ones ahead that you’ve still got.”_

Elliot knows his singing voice isn’t well suited to earnestness or sincerity—he’s always the one doing the playful, mischievous numbers; the big, flashy character songs, rather than songs about true feeling. But he’s trying his hardest, now, because this song doesn’t deserve anything less. _“Lightning caught in a tree branch won’t make that mistake again; you can’t step in the same river, nor read the same book. But it was enough that I shared this magic with you—and you’ll find magic again, if you only look.“_

He keeps going. _“Worlds upon worlds upon worlds—I’ll be some other where, and some other when,”_ Elliot sings, the song starting to draw to a close. He shuts his eyes, and lets himself breathe the last lines into the air. _“And then you’ll make a new door, and come through it again. And say—hello, old friend.”_

He was so absorbed in the song he nearly forgot where he was; so he’s a little startled when the applause rings out. “Oh, Elliot, that was lovely,” Roisin says, mopping her eyes with the side of her hand. “Did you write that yourself?”

Elliot shakes his head. “Jonah did,” he says, looking at Jonah.

“I—“ Jonah seems almost startled as he looks back at him. “You helped,” he says after a moment.

Elliot shrugs. “A little. It was mostly you,” he says, and it’s true—he remembers all those early days in the music room. Jonah hashing the songs out at the piano, constantly running his hands through his hair in frustration; Elliot sitting on the floor with the props list and looking up to offer him a line or hum him a couple of bars every now and then. The way Jonah leaped up from the piano bench and let out a bark of triumphant laughter, eyes shining, every time he finished a song. How everything they were doing at the time seemed so overwhelmingly important—and yet so simple, because back then all they cared about was making one good show.

Here, now, something inscrutable has taken hold in Jonah’s gaze, and Elliot feels it passing between them even though he doesn’t know what it is. Jonah just—keeps looking at Elliot, and for a second it seems like he wants to tell him something. But then he just lets out a little laugh, and nods, and holds up his hands so Elliot can see him clapping.

Elliot returns to his seat, and Caroline reaches across the table and pats his cheek, and next to him Hazel elbows him gently and smiles. And Elliot thinks, and stares down into the bottom of his glass, and pretends he doesn’t notice Jonah’s gaze drifting over to him still.

Then at everyone’s urging Conor comes out from behind the bar and sings for them, too; and then the old folks all sing “The Parting Glass” together, and that finally proves to be entirely too much for everyone. Bidding each other good night, Roisin and her sister and the musicians, and Elliot and his friends, wave each other out into the street, and go all their own ways home under the faint, cool light of the moon.

 

\--

 

At one in the morning, Elliot still hasn’t been able to fall asleep. Above him in their bed, Caroline and Jane have been out like lights for hours, and around him the rest of the house is silent as a held breath. If Elliot lifts his head, he can see the rooftops through the window and the inky sky above them.

He can either keep lying here watching the sky get light, or he can write. Elliot rolls off his mattress, and sneaks down the stairs and into the living room to where he left his keyboard.

Except someone else is already there, sitting on the sofa in the faint glow of the standing lamp, playing the keyboard with the volume turned down. “I was going to use that,” Elliot says crankily.

Jonah looks up, sees him, and lifts his hands, palms out. “Sorry,” he says, voice slightly husky from sleep. “All yours.”

Jonah gets up as Elliot moves over to sit on the sofa, and then he hovers in the doorway for a minute. “Can I stay and listen?” he asks finally.

“Only if you promise to be quiet,” Elliot grumbles.

So Jonah perches on the other end of the sofa, and Cillian Meowphy, who was napping on the piano bench, slinks over and jumps up onto Jonah’s knee. Elliot rustles his sheaf of paper and forces himself to focus.

He was thinking he’d play a bit of each of the songs starting from the beginning, so he can remind himself of everything he has leading up to the finale—so Elliot does, calling up in his mind the harsh, icy landscape; the cozy bookshop interior; then the color and fire of the open portal, beckoning and promising adventure. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Jonah listening intently; true to his word, not speaking, just looking up at the ceiling and nodding thoughtfully every now and then.

When Elliot finishes playing the last song before the finale, he exhales sharply and takes his hands off the keys, turning to Jonah. A smile is quirking at the edge of Jonah’s mouth. “I feel like this musical is what you’d find in the dictionary under _organized chaos_ ,” he says.

“I’m still ironing some of it out,” Elliot says defensively.

“No, no, I meant that as a compliment,” Jonah reassures him. “It’s good. More than good. Can I see your lyrics?”

Elliot hands his pile of paper over and, while Jonah pages through the lyrics, starts explaining his process for each song. Jonah’s nodding and smiling as he reads and listens, and every so often he actually laughs.

“These are _fun,”_ Jonah says. “When I first heard the premise I thought it seemed a little grim, but the songs are so—so vibrant.” He looks up at Elliot. “You should have been doing this a long time ago.”

“Well,” Elliot says somewhat coolly, shifting in his seat. “We already had our star songwriter. Didn’t want to dethrone him.”

“Elliot,” Jonah says with barely-disguised exasperation. _“You_ were the one who suggested I be the main songwriter in the first place.”

Elliot can’t say anything to that.

“You seemed so happy stage managing that I thought—“ Jonah sighs. “If you’d wanted to write, you should have said something. I would have let you. I mean, you contributed a lot to _Tintin._ Maybe more than you remember.”

Elliot blurts out, “Yeah, but even then I always felt like—that part in _Amadeus,_ like you were Mozart just waltzing into the room, and taking all my leaden waltzes and effortlessly turning them into gold, and then hyena-laughing about it.”

“Funny. And there I was always feeling like _you_ were Mozart, and I was Salieri.” Jonah tilts his head. “You do recall you were the one who came up with the lyrics for the ‘Great Story’ reprise, right? I was tearing my hair out for a week, and then one day you just—walked by the piano and sang me a perfectly rewritten chorus.” He smiles a little. “And after I got over my sudden burst of envy, I thought—how astonishing, to see someone so made for this.”  

And slowly, Elliot realizes that maybe this has been his problem all along. That when he wants something, he pretends he doesn’t, or goes around seething and resenting other people, instead of just doing the straightforward thing and saying what he wants. Maybe it’s because when he really wants something, just for himself, he’s afraid—of possibly finding out that he doesn’t deserve to get it, or of finding out that there are people who are actually willing to give it to him, or of just the sheer fact of _wanting_ anything so much.

Jonah’s still watching him. “The fourth song you played, earlier. What was that?” he asks.

Elliot pulls out the sheet of paper and hands it to him. “This. It’s Sebastien finally agreeing to go on the first quest with the Mysterious Man. He takes his hand, and they jump through the portal together.”

“It’s just lyrics.” Jonah looks at it. “Where’s the sheet music?”

“In my brain,” Elliot says proudly.

Jonah sighs audibly and moves closer to him on the sofa. “You’ll never be able to release rewards for the Patreon this way. Look, just—play it for me slowly and I’ll transcribe it for you.”

So that’s what they do; Elliot slowly going through the song, Jonah listening and dashing the notes onto the staves with his pencil. Every once in a while, Jonah stops and asks, “Can I make a suggestion? Only if it’s all right with you,” and Elliot says yes, and they proceed to argue over a chord progression or a slant rhyme. But it’s not an unpleasant bickering, at all—it feels familiar, and oddly energizing.

“I can’t read your handwriting, what does this say?” Jonah pushes the lyric sheet towards Elliot and taps a word with his pencil.

Elliot squints. _“Calumniously.”_

“Well, that syllabicates horribly,” Jonah says. He holds the sheet up and frowns. “Also, what’s with all these minor chords? It’s not a dirge.”

“It’s supposed to be unsettling,” Elliot reasons. “They don’t know for certain what’s on the other side of that portal.”

“Still. You need some brighter notes in there. Just a few.” Jonah reaches over onto the keyboard and plays, turning some of Elliot’s third intervals into fourths. “This part especially, you could have this sound more—magical. _Surely some revelation is at hand,”_ Jonah sings, “see, then you go up on the last note instead of down, that opens up the end of the line more.”

He’s right. Elliot plays it again the way Jonah did; already it feels more rich, textured. “Yeah, that makes sense,” he murmurs, sitting back—and it’s weird, to think he’s more at ease with Jonah right now than he has been with Nicholas all day.

“What about the finale?” Jonah asks. It’s three AM now, and Cillian Meowphy’s gone to sleep between his ankles. “What’s giving you trouble there?”

“They’re parting ways.” Elliot frowns. “The Mysterious Man says that his time here is done and he has to go, and Sebastien’s all _you came in and turned my whole life upside down, and I thought we had something special and now you’re just going to leave me—_ and the Mysterious Man goes _no, we did have something special, but I still have to go._ It’s—a lot in one song, I guess. It has to show Sebastien going through this entire arc of emotions. From anger to sadness to—acceptance and fond remembrance.”

“So it starts off with an argument.” Jonah thinks, and then he and Elliot look at each other and say in unison, “Patter song.”

“Would Sebastien really be angry enough for patter, though?” Elliot asks. “The way Hazel’s been writing him, it’s like he—keeps everything under the surface.”

“I think it’s okay to let him lose it,” Jonah says. “Just for a little bit. This is nearing the end, after all. It’ll be cathartic, it’s—it shows how much he feels he’ll be losing, when the Mysterious Man goes.”

“Right, right.” Elliot nods, suddenly feeling excited. “Okay. So it’d start with something like this—“ He bangs out a loud dissonant chord, then messes around a little with a chromatic staccato, thinking of Sebastien rattling off furious invective at the Mysterious Man until he runs out of breath. “Then this,” he says, slowing his playing; the Mysterious Man’s calm reply, explaining simply why he has to leave. Then, finally, a counterpoint, as Sebastien slowly says he understands. It works. Elliot can feel the entire song taking shape in his head. It seems so easy, so obvious now, in a way that he couldn’t see even just an hour ago.   

“Exactly,” Jonah breathes.

They’re beaming at each other. “I’ve missed this, you know,” Jonah says after a while.

“This?” Elliot scoffs, taking his hands off the keys. “Why miss this when you’re getting to do carpool karaoke with Anna Kendrick?”

“No, I’m serious. I mean, I really enjoy doing the show, and being able to sing Broadway covers for a living is fun, but—sometimes I miss _making_ things. With all of you.” Jonah looks down at the carpet and gently massages Cillian’s belly with his sock foot. “I mean, Shenanigans was our—it was the start of everything. It’ll always be home to me.”

Elliot nods. “You deserve better,” he says suddenly.

Jonah looks at him, confused. “Than the show,” Elliot says. “You’re clearly carrying the whole damn thing, you deserve better than that. I mean, what is your director even _doing,_ his complete and utter lack of style is giving Chris Columbus a run for his money,” Elliot adds sourly, and Jonah laughs. “Also, from what I hear, the man’s running out of JRB songs to murder.”

“Ha.” Jonah smiles wryly. “Don’t tell anyone, but next season is going to be all original songs. I don’t get to write any of them, though.”

“Shame.” A sly grin spreads across Elliot’s face. “Wait, you mean you haven’t regaled your castmates yet with…the Very Long Bong Song?”

Jonah’s expression dissolves into surprised, genuine laughter. “Oh my God, will you _never_ let that go?”

“How could anyone forget it? It’s a classic,” Elliot says, and immediately starts to play it on the keyboard while singing softly. _“Oh, my friend Blake threw a party, so we all came along, and then what did we find but a very long bong—“_

“You attempt to compose while high _one time,”_ Jonah says, elbowing Elliot, but he’s still laughing.

_“It didn’t feel wrong, to put it in a song,”_ Elliot continues, laughing too. “Come on, the next line is my favorite.”

Jonah rolls his eyes heartily, but then sings along with him, _“Then someone rang the doorbell and it went DING-DONG._ Jesus Christ, do you still have all of this memorized?”

“Don’t forget the fourth verse where everybody’s playing ping-pong and you extol the virtues of first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.” Elliot’s sides hurt from laughing, and he switches the keyboard off and leans his forehead against it. “God. We haven’t sung that one in a while. I guess not since—before you left.”

It’s quiet again. “If I could have found a way to keep doing this too, somehow, I would have,” Jonah says after a while. “I did try.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t have everything you want.” Elliot lifts his head off the keyboard. “Insert tired cake idiom here.”

“I know.” Jonah pauses. “Can I tell you something, though?” Elliot shrug-nods. “When we wrapped season one—there was a brief period of time when I honestly considered quitting and moving back to Boston. Just because that was how much I missed it. It was only the pep talk Hazel eventually gave me over Skype that convinced me not to.”

“Really?” Elliot thinks that Jonah never struck him as the homesick type before. “What did you imagine you’d do if you came back?”

“I thought I could find a place to live on my own. Nothing fancy, just something small that I could call mine. Then teach, maybe. I used to really want to teach; some days I think I’d still like to, if someone were to give me the chance.” Jonah looks at Elliot. “What about you? Have you thought about further studies? You could do an MFA in composition or something like that.”

“I’ve thought about it, yeah. I know I want to at some point.” Elliot puts his shoulders up. “But I mean, my day job’s not _completely_ terrible, and getting to do Shenanigans is enough for now, so I don’t think I’m in a hurry to go back to school.” He pauses. “I guess Nicholas and I are in the same boat that way.”

“Nicholas,” Jonah repeats, tilting his head at Elliot and seeming slightly puzzled.

It’s unexpectedly intense all of a sudden, having Jonah’s undivided attention on him, so close in this empty room. “Blake should totally go back to school, too,” Elliot says.

“Blake,” Jonah echoes, now looking even more puzzled.

“No, you’re right. Blake shouldn’t have to go back to school. Blake should already be auditioning for plays at the Brick, or Cherry Lane,” Elliot babbles, unsure why he’s still talking. “Heck, Blake should be _directing_ plays at the Brick or Cherry Lane. He has this idea for a revival of Rattigan’s _Adventure Story_ that’s, okay it’d need like, Elon Musk to fund it given the set design he has in mind, but if anyone could pull that off it’d be Blake.”

Jonah narrows his eyes. “While I agree that our Blake is—frighteningly talented, I have to say you’re doing a very poor job of segueing away from yourself,” he says. Then his voice softens as he continues, “It could just be the late hour, so I’ll forgive you, but if you really don’t want to keep talking about it, then. I’ll just say that for what it’s worth, Elliot—I think you could do absolutely anything you set your mind to. And I do mean anything.”

“I’m...” Elliot falters, feeling his cheeks warm. “I’m not sure I know what to do with all this—sudden complimentary sincerity from you.”

Jonah shakes his head. “It’s the same thing I was always telling you,” he murmurs. “Albeit not in so many words. Maybe you were just—never listening.”

Elliot falls silent as he thinks about that, too.

Jonah taps the sheet for “Mere Anarchy” and asks, “Can I hear this one again?”

“Why?” Elliot asks, feeling raw and strange.

Jonah’s eyes are bright in the lamplight. “I...liked it.”

So Elliot switches the keyboard on again and starts to play, singing almost under his breath so as not to wake the house. Jonah’s gradually shifted closer to him on the sofa, he realizes distantly; the cushions have dipped enough beneath their weight so that now they’re sitting flush with each other. He can feel the warmth of Jonah’s body right next to his, their hipbones and shoulders aligned. The way—unless he’s imagining it—the way Jonah holds perfectly still, every time Elliot breathes in.

_“But is there something you’re looking for?”_ Elliot sings—and he’s aware his voice is barely a whisper now, just the edges of the words.

Jonah clears his throat gently, and it’s enough to make Elliot stop playing. “Sorry,” Jonah murmurs, getting to his feet, and the sudden absence of him throws something inside of Elliot off-kilter. “No, it’s—I just realized what time it is, and we have to get up in a few hours. Long day ahead and everything.”

“Yeah,” Elliot croaks, barely remembering that it’s their countryside tour day. “We—right, yeah.”

Jonah rests his hand on Elliot’s shoulder briefly, and then as he lets his hand fall, it drifts down Elliot’s back—Jonah’s fingertips grazing his spine, the lightest brush of electricity. “You should...go to bed too.”

“I will,” Elliot says, his voice coming out oddly strangled. “In a minute. Just—“ He gestures vaguely at the keyboard. “Just going to make some last notes. For the song. So I don’t forget.”

Jonah nods, his lips pressed together. “Okay. Good night, Elliot,” he says, and for a moment it seems like he’s going to linger again—but then he turns, and disappears through the living room doorway, and Elliot hears his footsteps receding up the staircase and away down the hall, before he finally hears Jonah close his bedroom door.

In the silence, the living room feels uncomfortably alien all of a sudden; a liminal space rippling outward from where Elliot is sitting now on the sofa, alone. It registers finally that his body is wilting from exhaustion; his hands trembling, his shoulders sagging and his eyes closing—but even as Elliot curls up right there on the sofa and immediately feels the waves of sleep crashing over him, at the same time he feels some small, secret part of him has been suddenly, irrevocably shaken awake.

 

\--

 

Elliot wanders in and out of sleep, unable to tell where his dreams end and consciousness begins—so when Hazel starts walking through the house to do the wake-up call, blasting “What’s Up” from her phone, he’s instantly up and already strangely on edge. Like he has pins and needles all over his whole body, a restless humming inside of his bones.

On the bus to the pickup point for their tour, Elliot keeps catching Jonah glancing across the aisle at him. He does his best not to pay attention, but the constancy of it is unnerving.

Elliot leans forward and sticks his head around the backrest of Blake’s seat. “Blake,” Elliot hisses. “Can you do me a favor? I need you to be, like—the _best ever_ buddy to Jonah today.”

“Elliot, for the last time, I’m not in love with Jonah,” Blake hisses back. “And also, he and I are already _friends,_ so I don’t understand why you keep feeling the need to push this agenda.”

“No, no, he was telling me last night that he’s missed Shenanigans terribly,” Elliot says. “His creative self, his _true_ creative self, has been languishing. His soul has been unwatered for so long.”

“Unwatered?” Blake echoes.  

Elliot nods enthusiastically. “Like a house plant. So maybe you could do something to cheer him up and help him get back in the groove? Run some ideas by him that he could help with, ask him if he has any side projects he’s been thinking about...that kind of thing.”

Blake nods pensively. “I could do that. Do you think Jonah would be interested in experimental drone shadow puppetry?”

“I think he would love nothing more,” Elliot assures him.

Their tour coach is already waiting for them at the pickup point by Parnell Square; their guide, a chipper woman named Aisling, greets them all with an ear-splitting hello. “Lots to see and do today!” she shouts, herding them onto the coach. “So let’s try and stick to our timetable, all right? Last person back on the coach at each stop has to sing us their national anthem as a penalty!”

The driver sticks his head out the window. “Anyone want to ride shotgun, now?”

“Me,” Elliot says immediately, waving. So while his friends and the couple of German tourists joining them duck into the back, Elliot slides into the front seat and props his chin up on his knuckles so he can gaze out the window.

Everyone on board, the coach rolls down the highway and out of the city—then, as the sun comes up over the horizon, through acres and acres of rolling green land, dotted with clusters of farmhouses and grazing sheep. Along the way, Anna begins a game of I Spy, and then Hazel and Jonah start a long debate over whether “something peculiar” is too abstract an I Spy hint, and Kate groans and says that this is why they never play car games.

They cross the border into Northern Ireland and pass down the wide thoroughfare of the city of Belfast, and then drive onward to their first stop: Carrickarede, a tiny island off the coast. To get there, they have to walk up a road that leads onto a mountain path for a little bit, and then cross a suspended bridge over the sea and onto the island.

“Wait, guys, don’t forget our buddy system,” Hazel calls as they hop off the coach.

“A buddy system!” Aisling claps. “Fab! You’re making my job a lot easier, I can tell you. All right, team, grab your buddy and let’s go!” she calls, and gallops off up the road.

From afar, Elliot watches with satisfaction as Blake loops his arm into Jonah’s and starts chattering away, and Jonah only looks surprised for a second before he grins back at Blake. And then Elliot remembers who his own partner is, and every muscle in his body goes tense.

He looks up, defenseless, and sees Nicholas standing there in his dark jacket and red scarf (a scarf that he _gave_ Nicholas for Christmas, several years ago), crossing the path towards him. Nicholas, with his hair sticking up in the back and his glasses lenses all smudged; Nicholas, who Elliot loves, who’s so impossibly, wordlessly dear to him—but on this mountainside, in this light, looking half like a stranger.

“Shall we?” Nicholas asks. His voice casual, his face giving nothing away.

Elliot nods.

The group all follows Aisling up the path that curves up the mountain, looking out at the rock of Carrickarede island and to where the coastline juts out into the sea, and beyond to where the other scattered islands are shrouded in mist. The sky is a bright, early fall blue, and the air is clear and cool, with shifting breezes rolling in from the water. After they’ve reached a small plateau and descended the long flight of stone steps down the gradual slope on the other side, to the point where the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge begins, Aisling stops to do a headcount and line them up so they can cross one at a time.

“How high up are we?” Hazel’s boyfriend asks, peering over the cliff face.

“Oh, a good hundred feet!” Aisling replies cheerfully, giving their tickets to the attendant and stepping down onto the wood-and-rope bridge. “So watch your step!”

They’re instructed to cross single file, with only a couple of people on the bridge at a time—so since Elliot and Nicholas wound up at the back of the group, they watch everyone else cross first. When it’s their turn, Elliot grips the rope rails and steps on, carefully putting one foot in front of the other, Nicholas right behind him. The bridge bobs and sways under their weight as they walk; the wind is raking through their hair, and all around them the sun is shining, glinting off the surface of the ocean.

They’re barely halfway across when Elliot feels Nicholas stop dead behind him. “Nicholas?” Elliot says, stopping too. “You okay?”

“Mm-hmm,” Nicholas says, but his voice is slightly strained.

Looking back over his shoulder, Elliot sees Nicholas is standing perfectly still, both hands tangled in the rope on either side of him, staring with a kind of horrified mesmerization down past the wooden planks at the waves that are churning white far below.

_Oh._ “Nicholas?” Elliot says again, softer this time. “You—I didn’t know you were afraid of heights.”

“I didn’t either,” Nicholas says, barely moving his mouth. “Until now.”

“Okay. It’s okay. You—don’t look down, just look ahead.” Elliot points. “See?”

Nicholas looks, but when he sees the distance they still have to cross, he drops his gaze back down to his feet. “Mmph, nope, I think that’s worse.”

“Do you want to go back?” Elliot asks.

Nicholas shakes his head imperceptibly. “It...kind of doesn’t matter either way at this point. Might as well just keep going.”

And Elliot realizes with a pang that he’s never seen Nicholas this scared, of anything. In the past, Nicholas was always the one calming Elliot down, whether he was anxious or angry; Nicholas talking Elliot through it in clear, concrete steps, unspooling thread for him to follow out of the labyrinth in his head. And even now, he can see—Nicholas is trying so hard to keep his discomposure quiet and contained, because he’s the kind of person who never wants to be a bother to anyone.

Elliot takes a deep breath, and then says firmly, “All right. Nicholas? If you don’t want to look ahead, just focus on my back. Put one hand on my shoulder—yeah, like that, there you go—and we’re going to keep walking together. One step at a time. Okay?”

“Okay,” Nicholas says. He grips Elliot’s shoulder a little more tightly, and together, they take one step, then another.

“It’s not that far, see, we’re already more than halfway there,” Elliot lies encouragingly.

“Can we—talk about something else?” Nicholas gets out through his teeth.

“Sorry. What do you want to talk about?”

“Literally anything other than this bridge.”

On the other side, Caroline lowers her camera and yells, “Hey, are you guys okay?”

“We’re fine,” Elliot yells back, and then says in a normal tone to Nicholas, “Tell me about the kids.”

“The kids?” Nicholas takes a tiny, ragged breath.

“The kids back home, at the center. Which ones do you miss? And which brats do you not miss?”

Nicholas laughs a little. “I kind of miss all of them. Even the brats. There’s Maya, the bossy one. Jamie, who’s probably being bossed around and crying about it right this minute. Anjali, the one we have to hide the crayons from because she colors on everything. Russell J. Russell P.”

“Isn’t Russell P. the one who keeps throwing up in the Lego bin?” Elliot asks. He feels Nicholas tense up, just a fraction, so he slows down even more, taking smaller steps.

“Yeah, that’s Russell P. He’s always really contrite about it, though. Oh, and we got a new kid in just before I left, her name is Hermione.”

“Her name is literally Hermione?”

“Literally Hermione. You’d like her. She’s a pint-sized drama queen, she complains about everything, including getting too many camels in her animal crackers.”

“I don’t know how to feel knowing that this is the kid you think of when you think of me...but also she’s right, the lions taste best and the camels are trash.”

They’re only a few steps away from the island now. Seven. Six. Five, four. “Almost there. You’re okay, you’re okay,” Elliot chants, sliding one leg forward onto solid ground, then the other, and then turning around and holding both arms out to Nicholas.

Finally stepping off the bridge, Nicholas half-trips forward and into Elliot, so Elliot grabs both his elbows and supports him as he regains his balance. “Sorry,” Nicholas pants, hands on his knees and leaning forward, his face level with Elliot’s. “God. That was embarrassing.”

“No, it’s okay,” Elliot says, and he’s grinning now. “See? We made it.”

“Hooray, you did it!” Caroline calls, beaming at them from where she’s leaning against a railing. Jane is leaning next to her, apparently having watched them cross too, and she shoots them both a thumbs-up and a small smile. Further up the incline, Aisling is doing a victory dance for them with her arms raised above her head.

Nicholas grins back at Elliot. “Thanks for catching me.”

“Anytime, partner,” Elliot says, patting Nicholas’s elbow before letting go.

They trail after their friends, traversing the rocky ground of the small island, following the dirt path marked by the wooden handrails and looking out at the expanse of sea. As they walk, Nicholas points out the tiny lone fisherman’s cottage that sits right on the cliff, the only proof that people once lived here. Then Elliot makes a joke about how, if he owned such a cottage, he’d host exclusive Agatha Christie-esque dinner parties in it on stormy nights, and Nicholas laughs and wonders aloud what Romantic Hellenistic poetry Elliot would use as clues for his convoluted murder plot. And just like that, Nicholas is talking to him, actually _talking_ to him again, and smiling and laughing like there was never any awkwardness or weirdness between them—and Elliot is so relieved he could collapse into him and weep.

“You look happier today,” Caroline remarks as they’re riding the ferry back to the mainland.

“Yeah.” Elliot looks around, breathing in the salty air. “Today’s good.”

Caroline seems to be studying him, and then she says, “You and Nicholas are okay?”

“We are now.” Elliot glances at her. “I think we were both just tired yesterday. You know?”

Caroline nods, slowly, and then asks, “What about Jonah?”

“Jonah?” Elliot asks, startled, as the memory of earlier that morning, the two of them next to each other on the sofa, springs into his mind.

“Your big blow-up on stage yesterday?” Caroline raises an eyebrow.

“Oh. That.” Elliot makes a vague dismissive gesture. “I mean, we’re cool. We’re whatever.”

Caroline gives him a long look, and then says, “The two of you are at least more than _whatever.”_

But before Elliot can ask her what that’s supposed to mean, Blake calls from the back of the ferry, “Are there whales here? I think I saw a whale!” and everyone goes to look, and they start arguing over whether what Blake saw was in fact a whale or just a big wave. And then Kate posits that it could have been a selkie, and Jane asks what fashionable item of clothing they’d turn their sealskins into if they were selkies—so Caroline says she’d have a luxurious ankle-length sealskin coat, and Jonah says he’d probably have a sealskin smoking jacket, and then Nicholas, to everyone’s horror, says a sealskin _fanny pack,_ and Hazel gravely forbids Nicholas from ever being reborn as a selkie in a future life.

After they get back to the mainland, they get back on the coach and drive to Dunluce Castle, and stand in the center of the ruins on the cliff, looking around at the crumbling stone walls and archways. Aisling tells them that this is a _Game of Thrones_ filming location, but Elliot is envisioning what this place must have looked like all those centuries ago—brimming over with colorful tapestries and harp music and firelight.

“When you were a kid, did you have Microsoft Encarta?” Nicholas asks as they wend their way through the ruins.

“I don’t think so,” Elliot says. “I got exposed to the actual internet way too early, I learned a lot of creative vocabulary words and made at least ten different fansites on Geocities and also totally crushed the Neopian stock market.”

Nicholas laughs and nods. “There was this thing on Encarta that was like, 3D virtual tours of historical sites. The graphics were pretty terrible, but to me they felt so real. One of them was a castle, and I used to spend hours just—clicking through it, room to room. Imagining what it was like to actually be there, or anywhere that wasn’t my neighborhood.”

Elliot smiles faintly. “Where else did you want to go?”

“God, all over. Versailles. Angkor Wat. Pompeii. Jodhpur, that city where all the houses are painted blue.” Nicholas tucks the flyaway end of his scarf into his jacket collar and looks out past the castle ramparts, over the Atlantic. “We weren’t really the kind of family who traveled a lot, so I think...until now, part of me still always thought that my dad’s computer was the closest I’d ever get to anything like this.”

Elliot pictures grade school-aged Nicholas with his round Harry Potter glasses, drowning in his dad’s giant computer chair—absorbed in digital recreations of castles and temples and palaces he never thought he’d be able to see for himself. The thought makes him intensely sad all of a sudden. “We used to talk about traveling together, didn’t we?” Elliot asks. “The three of us, when we lived in the Eggplant. We said one day we’d backpack around the Alps or something.”

“Ha, yeah, we did. We always said between your Jean-Luc Godard-subtitles French, Jonah’s unfailing charm, and my immense talent for charades, we’d have gotten by.” Nicholas grins.

“I kind of wish we’d done that.” Elliot curls his hands into his coat pockets. “At the very least, it would have been interesting.”

“It’s okay.” Nicholas slips him a smile, his eyes alight. “I’m just glad that we get to be here, now.”

Watching him, it hits Elliot that he hasn’t just—listened to Nicholas like this, in a long time, and it makes him feel awful and selfish and like the worst friend ever. He’s filled with a sudden determination to be better for Nicholas, to be _so fucking good_ to him—because Nicholas deserves everything he ever dreamed about, he deserves to be happy, to get to do whatever he wants in life, and to have someone by his side who _always_ listens to him and cares for him and holds his hands when he’s scared and takes him all around the world to see sights just like this one, so that Nicholas’s eyes always, always light up just like that—

_And you should tell him that,_ is the thought that occurs to him next, and Elliot’s heart does a sideways lurch.

“Hey, we’d better go, or we’re going to be the last ones back,” Nicholas says, breaking Elliot out of his reverie. Sucking in his breath, Elliot nods, and the two of them make a dash out to where their coach is parked at the end of the road.

 

The Giant’s Causeway is an area along the coast made up of thousands of interlocked hexagonal stepping stones of varying heights—some of them almost perfectly even with one another to create level ground, others towering like organ pipes—all of them gradually leading out onto the water. All over, tourists are roaming and scaling the basalt columns; some of them trying to see how high they can climb to get the best photo, others just standing and taking in the view from below.

They have an hour to spend here, so after taking group photos they’re free to wander. Elliot feels too antsy now to go climbing, but he can see the others already starting to make their way across the stones to the more prominent part of the outcrop.

“Hey, Elliotolas!” Evan shouts across the distance, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Get your asses over here!”

Nicholas jerks his head towards their friends. “Let’s go?” he asks, and takes one step in their direction.

The wind’s picking up around them, whipping through Elliot’s hair, and ruffling Nicholas’s and getting it to stick up even more than it already was. And Nicholas’s eyes are shining, and he’s outlined in sun, and he looks so overjoyed just to be here—and all of a sudden Elliot knows, without knowing how, that if he and Nicholas go and join the others now, he’ll never say what he wants to say, he’ll never be able to tell Nicholas everything that he means to him.

“Wait,” Elliot blurts out. “Can I—can I talk to you? Alone? Now?”

Nicholas halts, his smile faltering, just a little. “Is...everything okay?”

“Yeah.” Elliot closes his eyes, feeling his heart pounding in his chest like thunder. “I just—can we take a walk for a few minutes?”

_“Guyyyys,”_ Caroline calls. “Are you coming or what?”

“We’ll catch up,” Nicholas calls, waving to her. “You go ahead.” Then he looks at Elliot, and nods, and in silence the two of them pick their way over the shore in the other direction.

When they’re far enough from any of the other tourists, standing in the middle of a small cluster of stepping stones surrounded by lapping rock pools, Nicholas says gently, “Hey, what’s up?”

Turning to face him, Elliot says, “Nicholas, I—“ And the split second he sees the look on Nicholas’s face, he knows that he already knows. That Nicholas is simply letting him say it, and that he has to say it now or this will never be over.

“I just needed to tell you that I think I’m in love with you,” Elliot whispers.

Nicholas’s expression finally gives way, to something soft and sorry, and he murmurs, “Elliot,” and Elliot thinks _it’s okay,_ he doesn’t need to apologize or console him with any platitudes; they don’t need to discuss it further, they can just go on and pretend this never happened.

But then Nicholas continues, “Elliot, you’re one of my best friends, and I didn’t—I was going to tell you, but I didn’t know how.”

Elliot stares at him, not understanding. “Tell me what?”

Nicholas takes a breath. “I’m—I’ve kind of been seeing Jane,” he says.

And Elliot still doesn’t understand—until suddenly he does, and then without having to think too hard he sees pieces of the past few days, weeks, months, falling into place in a way he couldn’t make sense of before. _Jane,_ he thinks, looking at Nicholas standing in front of him now. Jane, his best friend. _Nicholas is in love with Jane._

“So you just,” Elliot says, kind of hollowly. “This whole time?”

“No,” Nicholas rushes to say, shaking his head. “I—we weren’t hiding it from you on purpose. It’s just that it’s still complicated, and we didn’t know how to explain it yet, and then you—I just wanted—“

_We,_ Elliot thinks, hearing it echo in his mind. “Okay,” he says, stiffly. “That’s—it’s okay.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicholas says softly. “Elliot, I—you’re one of the people I love most in the world, you know that. And I wish it didn’t have to be like this for you. I understand if you’re hurt, or if you want to talk about it, or even if you don’t, but I just—I’m so sorry.”

Elliot says nothing.

Nicholas tries to reach for him, but Elliot recoils. “No,” he chokes out, startling even himself. “I’m fine.“

“You don’t have to be fine if you don’t want to be,” Nicholas says—and he’s doing his best to be kind, even now, and it’s more than Elliot can bear.

“No, really.” Elliot turns away. His jaw feels tight, and he’s blinking fast. “I don’t need—just forget about it. Literally just forget it.”

Stuffing his hands into his pockets, Elliot takes long, careless strides across the causeway—not caring if Nicholas follows him anymore, looking ahead to where his friends are. From afar, he can pick out their individual shapes; Blake striking dramatic poses for Caroline’s camera, Kate standing arms akimbo, Anna holding Evan’s hands and pulling him up onto the rock next to her. Jane, perched alone on a narrow column and gazing out at the ocean, the wind plucking at her dark hair and the tail of her white wool coat so she looks like a solitary seabird.

_Jane._ Of course. Nicholas and Jane are two of the best, most responsible, stable people he knows. It makes so much sense. Then Elliot thinks of Nicholas, lingering in the doorway of his and Caroline’s and Jane’s room in the house; Jane sitting next to Nicholas in the bar, arching her brow at him with the corner of her mouth turned up; Nicholas borrowing a guitar and writing new words for an old love song, careful and deliberate and clear—and Elliot feels like the biggest idiot in the fucking universe.

“You missed all the fun,” Jonah says when Elliot draws near. “Evan and Blake made a valiant attempt at reenacting all of _Once on this Island_ by themselves.” He’s grinning, but then he sees Elliot’s face and stops and says, “Hey, what happened?”

“Nothing.” Out of the corner of his eye, Elliot can see that Nicholas is standing next to Jane now, inclining his head and saying something to her—and to his surprise Caroline, _Caroline_ is there listening to Nicholas too, her eyes widening, and a mixture of shame and rage rises up inside of Elliot because is everyone just always fucking _talking about him behind his back,_ knowing things he doesn’t?

And suddenly Elliot is angry—at Nicholas and Jane and Caroline for keeping their secrets and letting him be the fool; angry at himself for not seeing it at all, for thinking that this could work, that he ever had a chance. He’s angry that they’re here, on this trip, in this beautiful, wild, heartbreaking country, standing on a stupid wet rock in the middle of the goddamn Atlantic Ocean, and that on top of everything he still has a show to do this weekend where he’s going to have to fake his smiles for hundreds of fans. If he could snap his fingers and turn back time right now, he’d do it, and the two of them would be back in the apartment they share—with him never having said anything, Nicholas never knowing, Elliot quietly letting his feelings shrivel up and die without ever saying a word, because at least then he’d be safe and they’d be just like how they always were before, happy before he, Elliot, opened his mouth and fucked up everything they already had. Because if things will never be the same, if some part of Nicholas is always going to be holding him at arm’s length now—Elliot will never be able to forgive himself.

“Elliot,” Jonah says, because Jonah’s still _here,_ staring at him like he wants to figure something out. “What’s wrong?”

“Why can’t you just leave me the fuck alone?” is what comes out of Elliot’s mouth then.

Jonah’s eyebrows shoot up. “Okay,” he says in a level tone. “What the hell?”

“You are literally one of the last people on earth I want asking me what’s wrong right now, and I don’t need you to keep hovering around me and telling me things about myself like I’m some kind of project that needs fixing, so you can just take your incandescent perfection and go blind someone else with it,” Elliot spits.

Jonah bristles. “Suit yourself,” he says callously, and then he turns and walks away.

Back in the coach, everyone’s pink-cheeked from the cold and energized and laughing; none of the others have noticed that Elliot’s upset, or that anything’s happened. Elliot’s just glad he claimed the passenger seat, so he can ignore Aisling’s voice that’s now grating on his ears and pretend to sleep.

They park around the corner from the long stretch of road called the Dark Hedges, which is lined with tall, twisting beech trees as far as the eye can see. Sunset is sinking in now, long fingers of light reaching across the fields and casting mystical shapes across the path as they walk. Elliot strays as far as he can from the group, shoulders hunched and his scarf bunched up around his chin, luxuriating in the gloom of the shadows.

Then Jane says from behind him, “Elliot, wait,” and he turns and sees her standing there, looking helplessly at him.

“I didn’t know,” is the first thing Jane says. “If I had, I would have told you sooner.“

“Did you even plan on telling me at all?” Elliot tilts his head to one side. “Or were the two of you just waiting for me to walk in on you in the apartment and have to decide to be cool with it right then and there?”

Jane stares at him. “Jesus, Elliot, we’re all adults. I’m allowed to figure things out in my own time, on my own terms, without giving you a play-by-play—and for the record, so is Nicholas.”

Somehow, Jane saying Nicholas’s name is what stings the most. It’s what makes Elliot realize that this is really happening—has been happening for some time, without him noticing. “So everyone’s an adult except for me,” Elliot snaps. “That’s what you really meant, right?”

_“What?”_ Jane’s eyes are wide with incredulity. “What the hell do you want me to say to that?”

“Oh, come on, I know it’s what you’re all thinking.” Elliot folds his arms. “Isn’t it why you’ve barely said two sentences to me since the other night? Why Nicholas hasn’t been able to look me in the eye? _Caroline?_ She knew about me, how long has she known about you? Have you all just been holding secret conferences trying to figure out how to break the news to me so I wouldn’t throw a tantrum? Because FYI, just saying _oh, by the way, Nicholas and I are a thing now_ would have sufficed. Could’ve saved me the embarrassment.”  

“I didn’t want to _hurt you,”_ Jane says forcefully. “None of us did.”

“And look how well that turned out,” Elliot replies acidly, more so than even he was expecting.  

Jane’s jaw is set. “Look, I get if you’re upset about Nicholas, of course I do, but—you having feelings for him, that’s a separate thing from him and me. You get that, right? You don’t have to be so—”

“So what?” Elliot says, raising his voice. “I don’t have to be so what?”

“You don’t have to be so barbed, and antagonistic, and feeling like we’ve been _conspiring_ against you, when actually we’ve been worrying our heads off about you because we love you and that’s what friends _do!”_ Jane retorts. Her voice is trembling.

And that should have been enough to deflate Elliot, but he doesn’t have it in him to let it. “Well, from now on, you can give up worrying about me,” he says coldly. “You were right. It’s your life. We don’t owe each other anything.”

Jane takes a step back. And Elliot realizes, they’ve argued before, she’s reprimanded him before—but this is the first time that he’s ever done anything to actually hurt _her._ And he sees it now, all over her face—and he hates knowing that he knows now what Jane looks like when she’s really been hurt, and somehow part of him still has space to hate himself because it’s all his fault.

Jane’s eyes are hard and bright with tears. “Fuck you,” she says shakily. “I’m sick of you. I’m not doing this.” And with that, she walks away, leaving him standing in the middle of the road, alone.

 

It’s evening when the coach drops them back off in the city center. Kate’s saying something about having dinner at a restaurant somewhere near the house; Elliot hasn’t been paying attention.

They’re all standing on the sidewalk figuring out whether they should wait for the bus or walk to the train station, when Elliot says, “You guys go ahead.”

“Hmm?” Evan says absently.

Elliot waves his hand. “Go ahead. I’m just going to walk around for a while.”

Everyone’s looking at him now. “What?” Hazel says. “Where are you going?”

Elliot lets out a small, bitter laugh. “Literally anywhere else.” He pulls his coat more tightly around him. “Don’t worry, I know we’re leaving early for the con tomorrow. I’ll be back before then. Wouldn’t want to cause any more trouble for anyone.”

“Elliot,” Caroline says, taking a step forward.

“Forget it,” Jonah says, putting his hand on her arm. “Just let him go.”

“Wait, what’s happening?” Blake asks.

Elliot turns. “Don’t wait up for me,” he says over his shoulder, and walks off into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cAN’T BELIEVE Aja correctly deduced what has been my super-secret Shenanigans rarepair all along!!!!! you’re a wizard Aja
> 
> my notes on the music and the locations are rather Long so I’m putting them in [a tumblr post](http://mayerwien.tumblr.com/post/184251650317/this-is-no-doctor-who-musical-chapter-3-notes) this time ahaha!
> 
> i've been screaming for what feels like centuries but there is one more chapter to go and i promise everything works out somehow! until then thank you for being here with me


	4. a little more homework to do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “He’s such a good person,” Elliot says softly. “He’s so _good._ And for one second I was stupid enough to think I was the person who could be good for him too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally called “you were the question and you were the answer,” as in from the titular song in _Bare_ —but now that I’m here and I see what all of this has shaped up to be, I thought the _13_ title fit better. We started with JRB and we’re ending with JRB; yay for bookending!
> 
> Thanks to Ceece for suggesting the piano scene, and for the sprints, and for holding my hand and letting me yell a lot.
> 
> (Also I was so sure I wasn’t going to cry while I was writing this, but I was wrong about so many other things so what was one more, really, hahaha.)
> 
> Last one, folks; sorry it took so long! This has been one hell of a ride. Thank you, thank you. :’)

Elliot walks. And walks. He turns at the college and waits for the light to change and then crosses the bridge over the Liffey, and turns again and keeps walking along the river, coat collar pulled up around his neck—past Georgian-style townhouses and empty convenience stores and pub after bustling pub. He passes gaggles of tipsy university students, all of them walking with their hands linked or their arms slung over each other’s shoulders, laughing as they playfully shove each other off the sidewalk. Watching them, Elliot remembers countless nights like that of his own—but they seem lightyears away now.

Elliot passes people leaving their offices and walking to the train station, and lone musicians lugging their guitars to their next gigs, and drunk men shouting indiscernible things across the road, and stretches of sidewalk decorated with pigeon shit and soggy paper bags and strewn shards of broken bottles, and he keeps walking. In the distance, someone is singing “Champagne Supernova,” _how many special people change, how many lives are living strange, where were you while we were getting high?—_ and Elliot thinks _what the fuck,_ what is it with this city and Champagne fucking Supernova?

Then Elliot walks along the perimeter of what seems like a gigantic fenced-off park, and it registers faintly that he’s probably not in the city center anymore; he’s entering some kind of residential area. And then he realizes his feet hurt and his hands are cold, and what lances through the numbness is the need to just get indoors. So he keeps walking until he reaches the nearest pub, a large, busy place that’s literally named The Hole in the Wall, and stumbles into it.

“Can I get a blackcurrant Guinness?” Elliot asks at the bar.

The barman stops rinsing out a pint glass and blinks at him. “A what now?”

“Oh, just...” Elliot sighs resignedly. “Whiskey, then.”

So the barman pours Elliot a tumbler of Jameson, and then Elliot retreats to a dimly lit corner of the pub with it and stares into the fireplace, watching the flames crackle in the grate. In the middle of this bright, happily chattering crowd, Elliot feels like a wrong thing; like someone’s cut him out of a different scene with a pair of scissors and pasted him into this one. The warm bittersweetness of his whiskey is filling his head. He simultaneously never wants to talk to another human being ever again, and wishes his friends would call him and tell him to come home.

But they don’t. Of course they don’t.

There’s a woman with silvery hair who looks about sixtyish, sitting alone at the table next to him, with a greyhound sitting primly underneath the table at her feet. Elliot watches the greyhound contemplatively for a while—probably for longer than he originally intended, because then the woman glances at Elliot and asks, “D’you want to pet him?”

“Oh,” Elliot says, surprised. “Can I?”

The woman makes a _go ahead_ gesture, and Elliot reaches down and lets the greyhound nose his hand before tentatively patting the top of its head, and then scratching behind its ears.

“His name is Gonzo,” the woman says. Gonzo looks up at Elliot with his round, liquid eyes, and then nudges his long snout against Elliot’s hand and licks his wrist.

And Elliot doesn’t know what strikes him then—maybe it’s the absolute perfection of Gonzo’s name, or maybe it’s the thought that he doesn’t even deserve _this,_ this dog being nice to him, because this dog has no idea what Elliot has done—but he suddenly feels choked up with emotion, and he doesn’t know whether to burst out laughing or crying.

“Gonzo,” Elliot repeats, his voice thick. Sliding out of his chair, he sits next to Gonzo on the floor, gently rumpling the greyhound’s ears between his hands. “Hey, buddy. Who’s a good boy?” Gonzo whines, pawing at the front of Elliot’s coat and wagging his tail.

The woman watches Elliot for a while, and then asks, “What’s your name, love?”

He blinks up at her. “Elliot.”

“Elliot. So what’s the story?”

Elliot takes a deep breath. “I fell in love with my roommate who is one of my best friends, and then I felt encouraged because hundreds of strangers were shipping us on the internet, and I saw what I wanted to see instead of the truth, and the truth is he’s not in love with me, he’s in love with my other best friend and I had no idea, and I was terrible to both of them and to all of my other friends too even though we have to do a concert together this weekend, and I think I just keep ruining everything and I don’t know how to stop.”

The woman pauses. “You know, normally when an Irish person asks _what’s the story,_ they just mean _how are you,”_ she says finally.

“Oh. Sorry.” Elliot grows quiet again. Between his knees, Gonzo pants happily.

The woman studies Elliot for another long moment. “Do you need another drink? Or some food?”

“Food would be nice,” Elliot says truthfully.

So Elliot gets up off the floor, and the woman, who introduces herself as Orla, orders several plates of tapas for her and Elliot to split, and Elliot drops the last bites of each of his into Gonzo’s waiting mouth. “Now,” Orla says, after she’s gotten her second glass of wine. She sits back. “What happened with your friends?”

So Elliot tells her in more detail, the story tumbling out of him in fits and starts. Orla nods while she listens, looking off into the distance instead of at him, and Gonzo, feeling neglected now that the tapas have run out, paws occasionally at Elliot’s knee.

“This might be a silly question,” Orla says when Elliot’s done. “But why do you think you fell in love with Nicholas?”

“Because he—“ Elliot falters, searching for the words to try to explain Nicholas, the unshakeable fact of him, to someone who doesn’t already know. “He’s funny and brilliant and kind and patient, and he thinks about everybody else before he thinks of himself,” he says finally. “And he cares about making the world a better place, and he thinks it’s his job, to actually _do_ that, to do as much of that as he can. And I think he’s one of the few people in the world who knows me. Like, really knows me, maybe better than I know myself. He knows me and he still puts up with me anyway, or at least he did, and I just...”

Elliot trails off, a lump forming in his throat. “He’s such a good person,” he says softly. “He’s so _good._ And for one second I was stupid enough to think I was the person who could be good for him too.”

Gonzo whimpers loudly, and Elliot, startled, looks down at him and realizes he’s asking to be petted. What evidence did he ever think he had, Elliot wonders as he scratches behind Gonzo’s ears again—really, that Nicholas could possibly have been in love with him too? Nicholas just—was there for him, in the way that he’s always been, and smiled at him in the way that made him feel like the only other person in the world. And having that, the security and the familiarity and the certainty of it, was better than anything Elliot ever had with anyone else before.

But that wasn’t enough, Elliot knows now. He never even imagined concretely what being-with-Nicholas would mean, the specifics of it, beyond them just continuing to live together. At the same time that he was taking all of Nicholas’s everyday gestures and slotting them into some grand narrative in his head, Elliot was somehow managing to dodge the question of whether Nicholas actually liked him back—maybe because deep down, some part of him already thought it was too good to be true.

And if all that was the case, then maybe Elliot never deserved Nicholas in the first place.

“I—I haven’t been there for Nicholas lately,” Elliot says, as much as it hurts him to admit out loud. He strokes the fur back from Gonzo’s forehead and swallows. “Not as his friend, or even just as his roommate. I haven’t listened to him or asked him how he’s been, and I _live_ with him. I just—entertain him, and keep talking about our shared past to remind him that we have it, maybe because—“ The rest of his sentence shrivels up in his throat, and he forces himself to take a deep breath before continuing. “Maybe because I’m scared it’s all that’s still keeping us together, and I...don’t know how to go beyond whatever that is, to whatever people do next when they’re not in college and they don’t have classes in common anymore. And because Nicholas is a saint he’s just been—indulging me, and letting things be, when that’s not anything anyone should have to do.”

Gonzo sneezes on Elliot’s knee, and Elliot pats him soothingly on the head. “I haven’t been there for Jane, either. I mean, if I’d—trusted her more, I would have told her how I felt about Nicholas a long time ago, and we could have avoided this whole thing. Or if I’d been a good best friend and made her feel more like she could trust _me,_ maybe she would have told me about Nicholas first. I don’t even know when the last time we had a proper conversation was. My best friend. I mean, could I have fucked up any worse than that?”

Orla wrinkles her nose. “Well, now that you say that—probably not.”

Flopping over onto his back, Gonzo bares his stomach to Elliot, so Elliot reaches down to oblige and give him a belly rub. “What if I’m just really that much of a selfish asshole?” he asks quietly. “I care so much about doing whatever’s most aesthetically pleasing, or whatever’s going to make the most interesting story, and I haven’t been stopping to think about how everyone else feels about it, I just—unload all my drama on my friends, and get them involved in shenanigans, and I forget that they have lives outside of me.”

Orla is just watching him now, so Elliot keeps going. “And maybe it’s that—I always need their attention so I _do these things_ to keep them involved, so they don’t have time to even think about saying no, because maybe I’m afraid the second I let up they’re going to realize it’s not worth it to stick around. What if I only know how to be either entertaining or poisonous and there’s no in-between?”

Elliot sits back, and says miserably, “I mean, what if I’m only just realizing that—I don’t even know how to love people?”

Orla tilts her head at him. “You finished now?” she asks.

“I think so.” Elliot presses his palms over his eyes.

“Well, I suppose I’m not in a position to tell you that you’re wrong about any of the other things you just said,” Orla says simply. “But do you want some advice about loving people?”

“Advice would be great.” Elliot drags his hands down his face, and then looks at Orla. “You remind me of my mom,” he says softly, and then rubs his eyes again. “Fuck. I haven’t even called my mom since I got here. And now I’ve just dumped all my problems on you, and I don’t even know you or what your life is like. I mean, maybe you have even worse problems. Maybe you’re like, a sheep farmer and half your sheep just died from some rare sheep disease, or maybe your husband is an eccentric creative writing professor who’s just told you he’s been having an affair with one of his students, and that’s horrible and no one deserves that, but you especially because you’re a good person—and maybe you came here just to get away from all that and walk your nice dog and eat tempura gambas and have a quiet night to yourself, and instead you had to sit here and listen to me whine about my screwed-up love life and how I’m a total failure of a human being. I’m so sorry. _Fuck.”_

“Well, first off, I’m a lesbian.” Orla says, casting him an amused glance. “And second, I think easing up on assuming things about other people is a good place to start.”

“Right. Yeah.” Elliot exhales. “God, I’m so sorry. I don’t even know why I was able to—have all these revelations about myself in your direction like that, when I couldn’t say any of it to my friends or even myself like, three hours ago.”

“That’s just how it happens sometimes, love,” Orla says in a kind voice. “Sometimes you can be so close to something that you don’t even know what you’re looking at anymore. It’s only after taking a couple steps back that you can understand it again—maybe even better than before.”

And she’s right, Elliot realizes. It was like he was in a friendship rut; he was so tangled up in his friends that he was somehow both terrified of losing them and taking them for granted at the same time.

Orla pauses, and then says in a light conversational tone, “You know the thing about having a dog, right? It’s that no matter how many years you’ve had them, and no matter how much you love them or how much they seem to love you—there are times when they just can’t tell you directly what it is that they need.”

Reaching over, Orla scratches under Gonzo’s chin, and the greyhound’s tail thumps a contented rhythm on the floorboards. “They do their best—barking means there’s probably a stranger about, whining means they’re hungry, standing by the door means they want to go for a walk, and so on. And you get good at translating, or deducing, or guessing. But even so, there’s a whole world of things you’ll never understand about them, that they’re still incapable of saying to you—simply because at the end of the day, you’re friends who don’t speak the same language.”

Gonzo whuffs happily, deep in his throat, and Orla turns to Elliot. “The advantage to having human friends,” she says, “is that when you don’t know what they need, you can ask them, and they can tell you. And when you need something, you can ask them for help. And that means you’re learning new things about each other all the time, and trying to be better people for each other even as you’re all changing.”

Elliot swallows. “What if...that scares me?”

“Oh, sure. Any kind of love for anyone is terrifying, I think. This entire mess of living is terrifying. But that’s all of us.” Orla smiles gently at him. “No one’s an expert at loving anyone else, Elliot. No one. Not parents, not children, not even those of us who are lucky enough to have been in love with the same person all our lives. But we do our best, and I think that’s all anyone can hope for.”

Elliot sits with that for a moment—the fear he has, what he thinks it means and why he’s afraid to look at it too closely. “So what do I do now?” he asks finally, in a small voice.

“Oh, I can’t tell you that,” Orla says, shaking her head. “No one can. But you know yourself, and you know your friends—so I think that means you’ll figure it out somehow.” She grins fondly down at Gonzo, who yelps and puts his paws up into her lap to lick her face.

A waitress comes up to their table and leans in toward them, saying, “Hey, sorry, just wanted to let you know it’s last call. Is there anything else you want from the bar?”

“I’m—I think I’m good,” Elliot says. He looks down at his hands in his lap, opens and closes them. “Thanks.”

Orla nods too, and the waitress leaves. “Listen, I brought a car, and I’m driving back towards Pearse Station,” Orla tells Elliot. “Want me to drop you off there? You’ll probably have better luck flagging down a taxi in that part of town.”

So they make the drive back into the city center; Elliot in the passenger seat with Gonzo sitting up between his knees, the greyhound’s long nose sticking out the window as he watches the river shining in the moonlight pass them by. The city feels different now than it did just a few hours ago. It’s like seeing all of it for the first time, the bridges spanning the river and the emptying pubs and the distant rooftops—and it reminds Elliot suddenly of just how big the world is; what a tiny blip he is in the grand scheme of it all.

At the train station, Elliot ducks down next to the driver-side window and says, “Bye, Gonzo. Be good for your mom, okay? And—thanks, Orla. For everything.”

“Call your mother, Elliot.” Orla smiles. “And go home to your friends.” Then she rolls up the window and drives away.

Standing alone on the curb, Elliot tips his head back and looks up at the moon for a while. He knows he should call a taxi, but he doesn’t feel like going back just yet—so he turns and climbs the flight of stairs up, up into the train station.

Elliot always forgets the odd mixture of discomfort and fascination he feels in liminal spaces until he finds himself passing through one. The darkened train station is ghostly-silent, the roof curving high above his head like the hull of a ship. A couple of people are sitting at opposite ends of the platform benches, glancing up every now and then to check the board, their faces illuminated by the lamps and the glow coming from their phones. Crossing the platform, Elliot thinks he’ll maybe just sit here for a while too—and then he sees the piano.

It’s an upright piano, its back up against the platform wall, and appears to be for commuters to play while they wait for their trains. The entire piano is covered with a mural of a wild sea, with curling waves and a bright cloud-filled sky above it, a kraken’s tentacles snaking up around the keys from the pedals below.

It’s a completely absurd-looking instrument, but Elliot is drawn to it anyway. Slowly, he sits down and lifts the lid, and places his hands over the keys. And because this is a train station, what comes out is “I Am The Starlight.” He’s not looking to see if anyone’s listening; this isn’t for them anyway. Elliot plays for himself, the sound of it ringing in the station around him and rising to the ceiling.

Then Elliot starts to deviate from the song he knows, turning it into something new and soft and aching, letting it build and build and reach a crescendo, and then bringing it crashing down like a wave. And as Elliot plays it’s like a knot inside of him is loosening—like there’s something he’s slowly, finally relinquishing his hold on, in a way that feels right.

A train arrives then, clacking and chuffing its way down the rails before slowing to a stop, and the few remaining people get on board. Then as the train doors close and it pulls out of the station, windows flashing by one by one as it disappears into the night, it’s like it’s taking the last of Elliot’s song with it, and he knows that it’s time for him to go back.

Outside the station again, surrounded by the crisp night air, Elliot pulls out his phone to book a taxi—and that’s when he sees he missed three texts, all from the same number, which he doesn’t have saved in his contacts. The first text reads, _Hey, you don’t have to respond to this at length, but just let us know that you’re safe._ The succeeding one says, _Oh and maybe give us a sign that it’s really you and not some mugger or serial killer who has your phone now_

The third text says, _This is Tim btw just in case you don’t have my number_

Elliot closes his eyes for a second and hugs his phone to his chest, and then starts to type his reply.

_Hey, Tim. Sign that it’s really me: in 2017 I wouldn’t shut up about how Andrew Rannells was totally robbed at the Tonys._ Then, _Sorry for the late reply. I’m okay. On my way back now._

Tim’s answer comes almost instantly: _OK. Nicholas says he’ll let you in. Going to bed now, see you in the morning._

Then Elliot calls a taxi, and when it gets there he collapses into the backseat, suddenly feeling like all the energy’s been pulled out of him. “Had a nice night out?” the cabbie asks, glancing back at him.

Elliot exhales. “Honestly? I’m—not sure what kind of a night I’ve had.”

The cabbie chuckles. “Jesus, I remember what that was like. Sure I don’t miss it.” He puts his hands back on the wheel. “All right, where to?”

Elliot starts to give the house’s address, but then he says, “Actually, would you mind if I stopped somewhere else first? There’s—something I have to do for someone.”

\--

The light in the living room is still on when Elliot gets back to the house. When Nicholas answers the door, Elliot says, “I got you something,” and holds out his invention.

Nicholas looks at it. “It’s a convenience store sausage roll,” he says. “On...a barbecue stick?”

“Do you know how hard it is to find corn dogs in Ireland at this hour?” Elliot asks.

Nicholas keeps looking at the makeshift corn dog, and then he looks up at Elliot—kind of quizzically, kind of warily.

“Okay, no, you’re right, this was a stupid buffer gesture, and it’s because I’m terrible at just coming right out and saying the things that are important,” Elliot says, and drops the sausage roll on the hall table. “And I want to be better about that, I really do, so here goes.” He takes a deep breath and tries to keep his voice from trembling. “I’m sorry about springing all my feelings on you and then being an asshole about it, and I’m sorry about causing a scene and walking out on everyone and making you stay up for me. I don’t have any excuses, and I’m not saying any of this because I want you to feel sorry for me, I just—I know I fucked up, and I’m so, so sorry.”

Nicholas looks at Elliot, and keeps looking at him. And then he opens his arms, and Elliot goes into them and leans into Nicholas, all his weight going slack against him with relief, and lets himself be wrapped up in a hug. Nicholas hugs him tightly, fiercely, and Elliot fits the top of his head into the space underneath Nicholas’s chin and presses his face into Nicholas’s chest and breathes, he thinks, for the first time in hours.

And with this somehow comes the revelation that even if Elliot can’t have everything else he was hoping for, he still has this—that even if everything changes, this won’t. He should never have doubted Nicholas. He wonders how he ever could have, even for a second.

“Come on, dummy,” Nicholas says into his hair. “Your hands are cold.”

They wind up sitting next to each other on the floor of the living room with their backs against the foot of the sofa, less than an arm’s length away from each other but not touching, the house quiet around them. Elliot pulls his knees up to his chest and watches Nicholas, who seems like he’s still thinking of what to say. So Elliot waits.

“I’m sorry, too,” is the first thing Nicholas says after a stretch of silence.

“What?” Elliot stares at him. _“You_ don’t have to apologize. You handled all of this mess like—inhumanly well. Like, there are probably literal angels in heaven who are scowling down at you right now because they’re jealous of how well you handled it.”

“No, but you...having feelings for me, and me and Jane, they’re two separate things. I could have found a better way to tell you.” Nicholas hesitates, a faint flush spreading across his cheeks. “It’s just, I was so surprised because I never could have guessed that you—I swear, Elliot, I had no idea until that night you were dancing with me, and even then I wasn’t sure. And then I didn’t want to assume, so I thought I could...wait and see, I guess, and figure out what you were thinking. I didn’t know you were going to come right out and tell me like that.”

“I don’t think I was planning to.” Elliot locks his hands around his ankles and takes a slightly shaky breath. “I think it was just—I was carrying all these feelings around for so long because I was terrified of actually _doing_ anything about them, and then being on this trip with you made me realize all over again how much you mean to me, and how scared I am of losing you.” He looks at Nicholas. “And not just because I—wanted to be with you, but because I suddenly realized how much I’ve been taking you for granted. As a friend, as a roommate, everything. And I’m so sorry I did that.”

Nicholas nods slowly and looks down at his knees.

“So what I wanted to say now is—even if I can’t be with you, I’m not going to take you for granted anymore,” Elliot blurts out. “I’m going to be better at listening to you, and asking you what you want, and giving you what you need. And I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know that I’d run into a burning building for you, no hesitation. Except I’m not a very fast runner so we’d probably both die in the fire, but you know, it’d be the thought that counted.” Nicholas laughs a little, and Elliot keeps going. “Because what it comes right down to is—you’re one of my best friends and one of the absolute best people I know, and I want to be better for you because I love you and I want you to always be happy. And even if you don’t want to be with me like that, it doesn’t matter in the end, because my life has already been so much better ever since the day you walked into it.”

Nicholas blinks, and blinks again. “Well, thanks,” he says in an odd voice, and it’s only then that Elliot looks and sees that Nicholas’s eyes are wet.

“Fuck, no, don’t cry,” Elliot says, even though he’s starting to feel the ache ballooning in his chest again too.

“It’s okay.” Nicholas takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes with one hand, and then polishes his glasses on his shirt and puts them back on. He smiles, a little watery, at Elliot. “I’m okay,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.” Elliot swallows and stretches his legs out again, the carpet scratching against his ankles, and gazes out the living room window. “I mean, I won’t pretend I’m not sad. But that’s my thing to deal with.”

“You’re allowed to be sad for as long as you need to be,” Nicholas says softly. “And just—I’m sorry it couldn’t be me, for you.” He reaches out and rests his hand on Elliot’s wrist, the touch like an anchor keeping him from drifting away. “But for what it’s worth, you know I’d run into a burning building for you, too. And I’m not about to let that change.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They smile at each other for a bit, and even through the hurt in his chest, Elliot feels himself keep breathing. _We’re okay._

“When we get home,” Elliot says. “I think...I think maybe I’ll go stay with my parents for a while. Just until I sort things out for myself. But I’ll come back. Unless—” Then Elliot hesitates, and he almost doesn’t say the next thing—but he knows it’s only fair to give Nicholas the choice. “Unless you want me to move out for real?”

“I wasn’t even thinking about that.” Nicholas’s brow creases.

“You can tell me if that’s what you want. Honest. I mean, if you want to move in with Jane, that’s—“

“Agh, no.” Nicholas’s frown turns into a grimace. “We’re nowhere near that yet. We have...our own stuff to work out, I think.”

“Oh.” Elliot pauses. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Maybe not right now? It’s nothing you have to worry about, though, it’s just…” Nicholas rubs the back of his neck. “There are times when I think I know how she feels, and then she does something to put distance between us again—and I think it’s my fault, that I’m doing something wrong.”

“I’m sure that’s not it.” Elliot pauses. “But whatever it is, you’ll figure it out.” He wants to ask how it happened, Nicholas and Jane—but he figures that’s a conversation for another day, too. “Jane probably hates me now, huh,” Elliot says quietly.

Nicholas sighs. “She doesn’t hate you. You lashed out unfairly at her, and she was angry at you, but she’s never beyond forgiving you. In fact, she tried waiting up for you, before she got too tired and went to bed.”

“Oh,” Elliot says, even more quietly.

“Talk to her in the morning,” Nicholas urges. Then he tilts his head. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”

“No, but—“ Then a thought does occur to Elliot. “You know you—you don’t have to sing the Time Ravel songs with me on Saturday if you don’t want to. I’ll ask someone else if they want to, or I can do them myself, or—“

“Elliot, they’re your songs,” Nicholas says, his brow crinkling. “Of course I still want to sing them with you, if that’s what you want.”

“And you should really go to NYU, you know,” Elliot continues. “When you’re ready, I mean. But you should know you’d be a shoo-in and you shouldn’t let anything else stop you.”

Nicholas pauses. “You know, I think I needed to hear that.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s the idea of actually doing it that’s been—a little overwhelming, maybe? Just all the stuff I have to get in order.”

“I can help you make spreadsheets,” Elliot offers. “I’m excellent at that.”

Nicholas smiles at him. “I’d like that.”

Elliot looks back at Nicholas, and for a second it’s like he can see their entire history laid out between them—all the classes they sat next to each other in, the study sessions in cafes and hallways and each other’s bedrooms. The long days spent running lines and reviewing stage directions and buying each other coffee after coffee; the long hours spent talking on the phone over Christmas vacation when they were both home with their families. The night of Blake’s end-of-freshman-year pool party when they were all drifting around in the inflatable flamingoes, and Nicholas turned to Elliot suddenly and said, _hey, what if we lived together next year,_ and Elliot grinned and answered, _what if I was thinking the same thing?_ The day they went to the shelter and adopted Ian Purrtis; the way they always argued playfully over trivial things like mojitos and dress shoes and Pasek and Paul scores—the way they always had each other to come home to at the end of the day.

That very first morning, when Elliot caught a glimpse of the back of Nicholas’s head all the way across a giant lecture hall and thought, _thank God—I’m not alone._

Nicholas grins a little. “What?” Elliot asks, suddenly self-conscious.

Nicholas shakes his head. “I can’t believe you gave me a corn dog stand reprise,” he says, and smiles.

“Come on, you had to know I would at some point,” Elliot laughs.

Nicholas laughs too. “If there’s anything I know about you, it’s that you’ll never run out of ways to surprise me. Which...include falling for me, apparently?”

Elliot groans and covers his face. “Oh my God, too soon.”

“Sorry.” Nicholas presses his lips together, and then they look at each other and laugh again—a little awkward, mostly relieved.

“We’ll be able to laugh properly about this someday,” Elliot says. “Promise.”

“One for the authorized biography.” Nicholas smiles and rubs his forehead. “But for now...I think sleep is on the agenda.”

“Shit.” Elliot glances at the clock; it’s even later than he thought it was. “Yeah, we should go to—sorry I kept you up.”

“It’s okay.” Nicholas gets to his feet and waits for Elliot to follow. At the top of the stairs, Nicholas adds, “I’m just glad you’re home,” and Elliot smiles. Then Nicholas turns out the hall light, and the two of them say good night, and Elliot watches Nicholas close his bedroom door before retreating into his own room, curling up on the mattress on the floor and letting himself sink into sleep.

\--

The morning dawns mild and cool, the sunlight spilling gently through the windows and down the back wall into the garden. Elliot is the first one awake, so he washes up and gets changed, and then goes downstairs and feeds Cillian Meowphy and sits in the kitchen petting him for a while. Then Elliot looks out the sunroom door and thinks the plants in the garden seem a little parched—so he steps outside and rummages up a watering can and carefully waters all the potted plants and flowers and shrubs, making sure to avoid the cobwebs stretching between the flowerpots so the spiders won’t be disturbed.

Then after that, Elliot thinks it would be nice to make breakfast for everyone, and after some consideration decides it would be best to avoid the disaster of the toaster altogether—so instead of making regular toast he thinks he’ll make French toast. And then it occurs to him that he could probably make bowls out of the French toast, so he does, cutting the loaf of bread into even blocks and hollowing each one out, and then dipping them in egg before frying them and lightly dusting them with sugar.

When the French toast bowls are done and all lined up, Elliot finishes cooking everything else, and then in the center of each bowl nestles a perfect poached egg, a slice of tomato, half a sausage, and a bacon rosette, and then covers them all with black and white pudding crumble and only the lightest drizzle of sauce from the tinned baked beans (due to the fact that he finds the beans themselves highly unaesthetic, and can’t for the life of him understand why they’re apparently such an essential part of the Irish breakfast). And all of this makes Elliot realize that he’s actually not half bad at cooking—and more importantly, that he enjoys it, and he makes a private vow to do it more often back home.

Then Elliot sets the table while he calls his mom, who is pleasantly surprised to hear from him, and after he tells her about their trip, he promises to send her pictures and bring her back some Irish lace, and tells her he misses her and he’ll see her soon. Then he calls the catsitter, their neighbor Max, to ask how Ian Purrtis is doing, to which Max replies that Ian Purrtis is fine if a little surly, so Elliot instructs Max to give him a lot of cuddles and to remind him they’ll be home in a few days; and then Elliot sends off a couple more important texts while making a pot of coffee.

Jane is the next person awake and in the kitchen, and when she sees Elliot she freezes in the doorway for a second. “I’m not going to yell at you anymore,” Elliot says, holding his hands up.

Jane narrows her eyes. “Good, because I’m in absolutely no mood to be yelled at.” Suppressing a yawn, she then eyes the table setting. “What is all this?”

“A deconstructed Irish breakfast.” Elliot tucks the frying pan into the dishwasher and shuts it. “I...thought it would be nice.”

“How very you.” Jane stalks across the kitchen for a clean mug and a teaspoon and pours herself some coffee.

“Jane,” Elliot says softly to her back, after a moment. “I’m so sorry. I was a dick, I should never have reacted the way I did.”

Jane stops stirring her mug, and lowers the heel of her palm to the counter with a dull thud. “Do you even know that the things you say actually have the capacity to hurt people?” she asks, her voice wavering slightly. “That you’re not just tossing lines around in some Aaron Sorkin drama?”

“I know.” Elliot feels a lump of shame form in his throat.

“Caroline didn’t even know, you know,” Jane continues. She turns to face him now, her expression stony. “About me and Nicholas. She only found out like, two days ago, because she asked. And she didn’t let on that she knew how _you_ felt until you told Nicholas, because she knew it wasn’t her place to say anything.”

“I should’ve figured as much.” Elliot leans back against the edge of the kitchen sink, exhaling slowly. “I just—I’m sorry for all of it. I really, really am.”

Jane is still staring at him, and then she blurts out, “God knows why, but I can never stay angry at you. I feel like I want to, but I can’t.”

“I deserve for you to be angry at me.” Elliot looks up. “But I’d be glad if you weren’t.”

“Well,” Jane says, a little strained. “I guess we’re both lucky, then.”

They blink at each other for a moment.

“Can I hug you now?” Elliot asks.

Jane looks up at the ceiling. “Okay, get in here,” she says, sounding like she’s trying not to cry, and Elliot launches himself away from the sink and throws his arms around her and squeezes her as tight as he possibly can.

“I love you,” Elliot says, muffled into her shoulder. “So much. You are one of the absolute best parts of my life.” Then he pulls away and adds, “And I’m sorry I’ve been such a bad friend lately. I guess I got so used to seeing you at work every day that I haven’t been asking you how you are, or making time to listen to you. But I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

“Okay, well, when we get home, you can start by helping me spring-clean my apartment,” Jane says with a wry smile, and Elliot loves her so, so much.

Cillian Meowphy is winding around both their ankles, so Elliot scoops him up and bounces him gently like a baby. “The Nicholas thing,” he begins hesitantly. “I get why you didn’t tell me. I mean...it’s not like I was eager and raring to tell you, either.”

Jane nods and reaches over to pet Cillian’s head. “Are you two okay now?” she asks, her eyes flickering up to Elliot’s face.

“Yeah, we’re good.” Elliot pauses. “Although I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed that neither of you enlisted me as your wingman. Do you realize how many getting-you-together schemes you robbed me of?”

Jane rolls her eyes and punches him on the arm. “Oh my God, Elliot, what, would you have Parent Trapped us in a dressing room?”

“No, I would have Parent Trapped you in the guest house,” Elliot says simply, and Jane punches him harder. “Seriously, though, I think it’s great that you guys are dating,” he adds, in a more subdued tone.

“Thanks, I think.” Jane purses her lips. “But we’re—not exactly dating. I don’t really know what it is yet.”

Elliot remembers what Nicholas said last night, about Jane pulling away and Nicholas wondering if it was his fault. “You’ve never really talked about this stuff with me,” Elliot says. He’s always known Jane was asexual-but-not-aromantic, but in college she rarely dated, and never professed any serious attraction to anyone beyond on an aesthetic level—which Elliot came to understand after a while, and then never felt the need to question her about. He sets Cillian Meowphy down on the floor again. “Is something bothering you? About Nicholas?”

Jane gazes out the kitchen window for a moment, her jaw tensing. “I was fine before this,” she says suddenly, in a voice that’s both quiet and almost savage. “You know? I never felt like I was missing out on anything, by not being with anyone.”

Shaking her head a little and blinking, Jane continues, “So when this happened, I kept asking myself, _are you sure,_ and then when it kept happening and everything just kept going well, I thought it was—I don’t know, more than I deserved. Especially because it was _Nicholas,_ and we’ve known each other forever. I mean—“ Then Jane breaks off helplessly, making a face in Elliot’s direction. “I mean, we met when he still only owned a total of three shirts, and two of them were the exact same ones, remember?”

“Ugh, that weird blue plaid? With the mustard-yellow stripe?”

_“Yes._ And remember how in sophomore year he had that bizarre phase when he went around singing ‘Macavity’ under his breath literally every single day?”

“Oh my God, yeah, I forgot about that. Nicholas is such a dork sometimes.”

“I _know.”_

It’s quiet again for a while as both of them look out the window. “It’s weird, right,” Elliot says.

“So fucking weird.” Jane buries her face in her hands.

“Awww, ace-spec friends.” Elliot leans against her and puts one arm around her, and Jane laughs, finally, and leans against him too. “And you deserve everything,” he adds. “But you knew that already.”

Jane gives a little sigh, like she’s being impatient with herself. “It’s nice for once to not worry about having to explain yourself to someone,” she murmurs. “To know that they’re never going to—guilt-trip or pressure you into anything, or expect you to change your mind, because they already understand. Because they already know you.”

“Of course,” Elliot says softly.

“But also I’m just worried that—“ Jane bites the inside of her cheek. “You know how the thing about Nicholas is that he always tries to put your feelings before his? I’m worried that’s what he’ll constantly be doing, with me, and not admitting that he had—a different idea of what he wanted in a relationship. And then one day it won’t be enough for him, but he won’t want to say it because he’s a good person, so he’ll just...be stuck with something he can’t get out of, and secretly unhappy.”

_“Jane,”_ Elliot says, a pang in his chest at the thought that Jane’s been telling herself that this whole time. “Have you talked to Nicholas about this?”

“I tried.” Jane’s mouth is a line. “I told him one day he’ll wake up and realize he’s disappointed. I don’t think he believes me.”

Elliot tips his chin down to look at her. “I think this is the part where you believe him,” he says quietly.

Jane lifts her head, eyes wide. “You’re important to him,” Elliot tells her. “And as much as Nicholas puts other people before himself, I also don’t think he’d do something he wasn’t already sure of.”

A small smile creeps onto Jane’s face. “You know, that was actually pretty good.”

“See,” Elliot says triumphantly. “A-plus wingmanning.”

Jane looks up at the ceiling again in mock exasperation, but the smile grows wider.

Once everyone’s awake and assembled at the breakfast table, Elliot clears his throat and says, “Can I say something first? I acted like a jerk yesterday, and I’m sorry for running off like that. I had some stuff I had to work out, but I’ve worked it out now, so just—“ Elliot looks at Jonah, hoping he’ll get that as much as this apology is for all of them, it’s also for blowing up at Jonah specifically. “I’m sorry.”

And Jonah seems to understand, because he presses his lips together and then inclines his head slightly in a nod.

At the other end of the table, Hazel sighs gustily. “You absolute knucklehead,” she says, and pushes her chair back and gets up and hugs him. And Elliot is surprised, because Hazel’s never really been huggy with him—but he hugs her back. And then Anna hugs him from behind, and Evan says, “Are we all doing this? I guess we’re all doing this,” and then Elliot is collapsing under the weight of a giant group hug as everyone joins in, laughing.

And Elliot knows what this feels like now—it reminds him of when he was little, and his mom had their old piano in the living room tuned for the first time in years. Before that, Elliot had been playing around on it and had gotten used to the slightly warped sound of the keys—so when the piano got tuned, and he played it again and heard for the first time what it was supposed to sound like all along, he was amazed at how he’d never realized it was out of tune before; how much clearer it had suddenly become.

And Elliot knows that the work of being a better friend he has to do is more than just a couple of conversations and apologies and _I love you’s_. But this is him pulling himself out of the rut. Getting back in tune.

This is a good start.

On their way out the door to the bus stop, Elliot stops Blake. “Blake,” Elliot says. “Listen, I’m sorry I kept throwing you at Jonah this past week instead of listening to you when you said you weren’t into him. It’s my fault, I’m way too trope-savvy for my own good, and I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Well,” Blake says, sniffing. “Well…good.”

Blake starts down the front path, and then looks back over his shoulder at Elliot. “Even if I were into Jonah, you know it was never going to work,” he says. “Your scheme.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t say _never,”_ Elliot says, somewhat offended. “I’m good at schemes most of the time, I’m pretty sure you would have had a decent chance.”

Blake just keeps looking at him. “You really don’t know anything, do you,” he says pityingly.

Elliot blinks. “What?”

Blake just shakes his head. “Trope-savvy, my ass,” he mutters, and pushes his way out the front gate.

The convention centre is completely transformed from when they saw it earlier in the week. Today it’s swarming with hordes of people—college kids in Steven Universe T-shirts and Hogwarts robes, parents chaperoning their small children, dozens of professional-looking cosplayers—and colorful booths and event spaces are set up everywhere, underneath large banners with _StrangelyCon 2019_ splashed across them. Looking around at the bright, chaotic spectacle, Elliot thinks that he’d probably never have attended a con like this on his own—but he understands the appeal now; the energy these places have thrumming through the air, the way they make everyone feel like they’re tapped into the same heartbeat.

Cliona meets them in the lobby, and passes a tangle of con badges and lanyards to Elliot. “Your interviews are scheduled to start at half past two,” she says, “so feel free to wander the con until then!”

“Thanks, Cliona,” Elliot says, waving goodbye to her. Pulling one con badge free from the knot, he calls, “Hazel,” then tosses it to her. “Here you go. Anna...Caro…”

Then he flips over the next badge in his hand, which reads _Tim_. “Tim!” Elliot says delightedly, turning to face him.

Tim stares. “That...was the first time you used my actual name in four years,” he says.

“Yeah...sorry about that. I know that joke outlived its own humor a long time ago.” Elliot holds the badge out like a peace offering. “Never again. Promise.”

Tim looks relieved. “Thanks,” he says, taking his lanyard and looping it over his neck.

Elliot claps Tim on the shoulder. “You’re welcome, Timothée,” he says heartily.

Tim looks slightly less relieved. “It’s...it’s just Tim.”

“Okay, gang, let’s go!” Hazel beckons over her shoulder, and they file into the ground-floor hall together.

After exploring some of the larger sponsor booths, they go through the artist alley, slapping each other excitedly on the arm every time they see someone selling a Shenanigans print or button. They stop at each table to have a chat and purchase something from the artists, who always look overwhelmed with happiness before they ask if they can take a selfie or get a hug. It’s one thing, Elliot thinks, marveling, to know you have fans and interact with them online—and another to actually be meeting them in person, in a totally different country no less, and see firsthand the impact your work has made on them. It feels, he thinks, pretty freaking amazing.

After they’ve circled the halls, they sit on the carpet out on the second floor landing and watch stormtroopers and Overwatch heroes line up for the cosplay contest. And then a couple of congoers spot them and duck down shyly to say hello, and before they know it, a small gaggle of Shenanigans fans has gathered on the floor around them, and Jonah and Hazel are answering questions and sharing behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

“Oh, wow,” one kid who looks about fifteen exclaims when they see Elliot. “You really do always wear a suit in real life.”

Elliot laughs. “Hey, I like your jacket!” he says, pointing at the kid’s blue TARDIS-inspired blazer.

The kid beams. “I made it myself.”

“Seriously? That’s a pro job right there; your stitching is impeccable.” Elliot shrugs off his own suit jacket. “Wanna trade for a bit?”

So they do, and then Caroline takes a picture of both of them wearing each other’s jackets—just as up front, another kid with a rainbow flag cape hands their ukelele over to Jonah. “Okay. I think you all know this one,” Jonah says, grinning and strumming the ukelele, and then he starts to lead everyone in a rousing chorus of “Aslan Is A Dick.”

And everyone sings along— _everyone._ All the people around them, from the middle-schoolers to the twenty-somethings just like them, know every single word of this ridiculous song that they made for fun one night at a house party. Looking around, listening to them singing, Elliot almost can’t believe it. It’s enough to take his breath away. He meets Caroline’s eyes, and from the way they’re shining, he knows she’s thinking the same thing.

Off to the side of the group, Nicholas and Jane are sitting next to each other on the floor, laughing at Jonah and singing along every now and then. When Elliot catches sight of them, he just watches them from afar for a moment. Even now that he knows, the two of them seem pretty much the same as they always do—except Elliot can see now that there’s a certain way they both look at each other when the other person’s not looking, fond and questioning at the same time. Nicholas and Jane are both fun and smart as hell and can be incredibly sharp when they want to be, but when they’re quiet, they’re the same kind of quiet, Elliot thinks; the kind that will fit well around each other, that can settle into each other and make a home.

“I could never have been enough for him, could I,” Elliot murmurs to Caroline.

“Oh, hush,” Caroline says. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Not being enough is different from not being right for someone. You’re already _enough.”_ Then her tone softens, and she puts her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” she says gently. “I know how hard it is for you to risk things that mean a lot to you, so it—must have been a lot for you just to tell him.”

Elliot gazes over at Evan and Anna, who are sitting shoulder to shoulder and leaning against each other. “I just...I feel like it was my one shot left at something that could really work, you know?” he says. “I mean, if it wasn’t this—what do I have to hope for now?”

“Elliot.” Caroline squeezes his arm. “For someone like you, I’m sure the universe has at least a few more surprises planned.”

Elliot looks at Nicholas and Jane again. Nicholas is inclining his head toward her and telling her something, and then Jane laughs and, hesitantly, reaches up to ruffle his hair. Grinning, Nicholas ducks away, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“I’m happy for them, though,” Elliot says, and he means it. Then he turns to Caroline. “And I love you, you know. I’m sorry I didn’t say it enough while we were dating.”

Caroline sighs a little, and smiles, and hooks her chin over his shoulder. “You know, somehow it means more that you’re saying it now,” she says, and Elliot leans his head against hers.

The song ends, and the fans cheer and applaud wildly. “You all are amazing,” Jonah says, grinning and looking around at them. “Okay, what are we doing next? Any requests?”

_“It’s A One-Spaceship Town,”_ Elliot calls over their heads.

Jonah glances across the crowd at him, the expression on his face one of momentary surprise. “Care to start us off?” he asks finally.

_“Been living at this spaceport seventeen years,”_ Elliot sings out, and the crowd cheers. Jonah nods and starts to strum along. _“Ain’t seen anything you could call an adventure—“_

_“So what the hell am I still doing here,”_ the fans sing in unison, and Elliot holds his arms out to them and beams.

When it’s nearing two, they wrap up their impromptu meet-and-greet and take one last giant group photo courtesy of Caroline’s selfie stick, before saying goodbye to the fans and telling them they’ll see them tomorrow, and heading off to do their round of interviews in the lounge. They’ve just finished their last one when Cliona pops her head in through the door.

“Ugh, hey, I’m _so_ sorry to bother, but a bunch of the cosplayers for the VR demo booth are having some costume trouble.” Cliona looks apologetically at Anna. “I know you’re an absolute wizard with a needle, so if it wouldn’t be too much trouble…?”

“No trouble at all!” Anna says, uncrossing her legs and getting to her feet. “I can definitely lend a hand.”

“Great, thank you so much,” Cliona says, smiling at Anna and showing her out the door and down the hall. Before she leaves, Cliona glances over her shoulder at Elliot, who gives her two thumbs-up.

“Okay, everyone,” Elliot announces to the group as soon as Anna’s gone, and raises his hands like a conductor. “We don’t have much time to practice, so let’s get this right. And a-five, six, seven, eight—“

\--

The house is a flurry of chaos and noise Saturday morning, with everyone thumping up and down the stairs swearing and looking for some misplaced prop or piece of clothing. As they’re finally getting ready to leave, Elliot tells them he got a text from Roisin about a plumber coming to check the kitchen sink, and that she’s asked Elliot to stay behind at least until the plumber gets there to let him in. “You sure?” Caroline asks.

“Yeah, it’s not a problem.” Elliot sits at the sunroom table and flips open a newspaper. “I’ll be an hour at most, plumber says he’s already on his way. Plenty of time for me to catch up to you.”

“Okay,” Nicholas says, picking up the last of the roller bags off the front step. “Just text us when you’re headed to the convention center.”

Elliot waves them all out. “See you in a bit.”

“See ya, Elliot,” Evan says, and winks over his shoulder just before he closes the front door.

As soon as he hears them disappear down the street, Elliot jumps to his feet and gets to work setting the house up. Cillian Meowphy insists on getting in the way, twining around Elliot’s ankles and meowing petulantly, so Elliot opens the door to the garden and shoos him out. As Elliot grabs the keyboard from the living room and carries it outside, he starts humming idly—a random nothing tune at first, that slowly turns into the melody he was working on for _Time Ravel—_ and then words start forming in his mind to go along with it, line after line, so fast he has to drop everything and grab his phone to write them down before he forgets.

Standing there in the doorway to the garden, Elliot is so focused on punching lyrics into his notes app that the sound of the front door opening and closing again almost doesn’t register. At first he thinks, _oh good, the plumber’s here—_ and then he stops and remembers, _wait, we made the plumber up, there is no plumber,_ and whips his head up just in time to see the person coming into the sunroom.

Elliot frowns. “What are you doing back here?”

Jonah shrugs, slipping out of his coat and draping it over the back of a chair. “Figured it’d be faster with two pairs of hands instead of one. So I said I forgot my sheet music and that I’d catch the next bus with you.” He reaches down to pick up the extension cord from the sunroom floor and starts unspooling it.

“You didn’t have to,” Elliot half-grumbles, but he accepts the other end of the extension cord from Jonah and pulls it out into the garden. Cillian Meowphy, noticing that Jonah’s come back, meows and squeezes past Elliot’s legs to get to him.

Jonah inspects the socket next to the sofa bed. “This won’t fit,” he says, looking down at the plug in his hand.

Elliot points. “Adaptor’s over there.”

“Oh.” Jonah picks it up from the table. “Thanks.”

“Sure.”

For a while, they continue the setup without speaking. Then, out of nowhere, Jonah says, “For what it’s worth...I’m sorry the Nicholas debacle happened.” He says it without looking at Elliot, scratching Cillian behind the ears with one hand. “Not to pry, it’s just—now I know why you were so upset.”

And Elliot’s first instinct is to say _it’s none of your business,_ or at least _yeah well whatever—_ but what he finds himself saying instead is, “Yeah, it’s—it was a lot to process, I guess.” He looks down at the end of the wire in his hand, blinking, before shaking his head and tossing it over the trellis. He can’t quite reach it, though, and it flops hopelessly to the ground.

Jonah nods. “The two of you have always been especially close,” he remarks, picking the wire up and hanging it over the trellis easily. “I imagine it wasn’t easy. Having to—reconsider and then reconsider again, what he was to you.”

Elliot picks up another wire and hands it to Jonah, who hooks it over the trellis next to the first one, and they start to fall into a rhythm that way. “I think part of it was that it just felt like it—made sense to me, you know? Maybe it’s not something you’ll be able to understand, but I don’t imagine myself with people very easily. But Nicholas, he...made sense.”

“I know,” Jonah says, his voice a little softer.

Elliot keeps talking as he works. “I had this whole thing in my head about how we were like, the gun that had been on the wall the whole time that was finally going to go off, or something. Probably it was stupid of me to think that narratives actually line up that neatly in real life. I guess I just wanted the great love story of my life to be something other than _we swiped right on each other on Tinder,_ but I don’t know, I guess I don’t really have much of a choice now.”

Then Elliot realizes Jonah has stopped passing him wires, and is just—standing there, looking at him, remaining very, very still. “What?” Elliot asks.

“Two truths and a lie,” Jonah says.

Elliot stares back at him. “What?”

“Two truths and a lie,” Jonah repeats. He drops the wire he’s holding onto the ground and cocks his head at Elliot. “A. I hate you. I’ve always hated you. I think you’re tiresome and a nuisance and I regret ever agreeing to be your roommate, much less start an amateur theatre company with you.”

Elliot frowns and opens his mouth—but then he sees the look on Jonah’s face, and he stops.

“B,” Jonah continues, his gaze unwavering. “I don’t know what to make of you. I never have. I used to lurk around our ridiculous purple apartment just trying to figure you out, what you wanted, because you’re dramatic and impossible and confusing as hell.”

Elliot’s breath catches in his throat. “Jonah,” he whispers, too soft even for himself to hear.

“And C.” Jonah’s eyes are blazing now. “I’m in love with you. From the very beginning, since freshman year, I wanted _you,_ but I could never just come right out and tell you because you were never, never looking at me. And so much of the time I was away I spent trying to forget you, but none of it did me any good, because all I had to do was—walk into the room and see you, just _standing_ there, to feel it all over again.”

Elliot shakes his head. His hands are curled into fists so they won’t shake. “But you can’t,” he stammers. “You can’t—”

_“Elliot,”_ Jonah says, almost angrily, completely desperately, and then he steps forward and kisses him.

And it can’t possibly last more than a few seconds, but Jonah has pulled him so close and is holding him so surely that Elliot’s defenses fall away—and as Elliot becomes acutely aware of the way he’s crushed into Jonah, with one of Jonah’s warm hands curled against his cheek and the other pressed firmly into the small of his back—how he’s arching into Jonah, how it’s like Jonah is trying to breathe him in—it occurs to Elliot that this is something he should have always known; that it’s unbelievable how he could have refused to see it before. In that single, sharp, breathless moment, Jonah kisses Elliot like he never wants to let him go, and then he lets him go.

The sudden absence of Jonah is dizzying. Stepping back, Jonah looks at Elliot with some sort of realization dawning in his eyes, and instantly Elliot sees the line of Jonah’s body go hard, like he wants to fold tightly into himself—and it makes some deeply buried part of Elliot instinctively want to reach out and draw him close again, even as his brain is telling him that that can’t have just happened, that everything about this is impossible. The light around them seems too bright all of a sudden, and Elliot feels like the ground is still tilted under his feet, the blood pounding in his head, his whole body prickly and hot and wide-awake. He takes a breath for the first time in what feels like forever, and thinks he can feel Jonah’s warmth lingering there, pressed against his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” is the first thing Jonah says. His voice is low and rough. “I shouldn’t have—that was irresponsible of me.”

“No...it’s okay.” Elliot stares down at his shoes while he wrestles with his heartbeat, forcing it to slow down.

A strange, gauzy kind of silence falls over them then. For a while, all they can hear are bird sounds from the trees across the wall; farther away, the high voices of a group of little kids headed towards the neighborhood playground. “Please say something,” Jonah says finally. He’s talking to the trellis now, half-turned away from Elliot like he’s ashamed. “Even if it’s to tell me I’ve made a mistake. I’ll understand.”

“It’s not that, it’s just—Jonah, you don’t— _know_ me,” Elliot says helplessly, needing him to see. “You think you do, and maybe it’s that you’d like me to be someone else but whoever that is, it’s not me.”

Jonah turns back then, and stares at him incredulously. “I don’t _know_ you?” he asks. “Elliot, we lived together for almost two years. You like your toast cut diagonally because you think it’s more aesthetically pleasing than toast that’s cut straight across. You have a full dissertation on _Giant_ written out in your head that you’ll recite for anyone at the drop of a hat, whether they want to hear it or not. You know every single word of every single High School Musical song, but you only ever sing them in the shower because you’re embarrassed to admit it, but I know this because _you told me,_ when you got drunk at Blake’s birthday party in sophomore year, and I never told anyone else. You hate when strangers invade your personal space and assume they can touch you, but when you’re close to someone you don’t mind draping yourself all over them like a trailing vine. When you were five you wanted to be a chorus girl and had your mom make you a skirt out of her old curtains. Your favorite painter is John Singer Sargent. You hate the rainy season, but you love the sound of rain. _Elliot.”_ Jonah’s eyes are burning. “Just who exactly do you take me for?”

And Elliot—stares at Jonah, barely breathing, feeling shot through to the core with that sense of being _seen,_ that he had just started to accept he would never have with anyone else ever again. And at the same time Elliot realizes, of course, that he knows things about Jonah too, of course he does—that he can come up with a whole catalog of small things if he tries. That Jonah loves fall the best; that he’s badly allergic to crab; that his elementary school music teacher was the first person and for a long time, the only person, who encouraged him to sing. That Jonah cried buckets and tried not to show it the first time he listened to _Fun Home;_ that when Jonah was a little kid he had a golden retriever named Indiana, and that when she died unexpectedly a few years later Jonah’s dad called a breeder and had a new puppy sent over instead of telling Jonah it was okay to be sad. Elliot wonders if he collected these things over the years intending to use them as—ammunition for something, only to realize this wasn’t stuff you weaponized, this was just stuff you learned about someone you considered a friend.

And that’s what he is, Elliot allows himself to realize. Jonah has been his friend, has tried so _hard_ to be his friend all this time. And Elliot hasn’t hated, or even really disliked Jonah, in a long, long time—he just got so used to playing the role because he thought it was what he was supposed to do, because it was easier than actually just being decent and good towards him instead.

And Elliot doesn’t know what to say now, feeling vaguely like he needs to sit down though he can’t bring himself to move—but Jonah keeps talking. “When I got the audition, and the offer,” he says. “Apart from knowing it was a great opportunity, at the time I thought—what the hell was I still doing? What did I think I was waiting around for? I thought getting away would help me reset my brain, and then we fell out of touch, and I thought, this is it. And I thought it was fine. And then—“

Jonah takes a deep breath. “And then this trip happened. And being with all of you, and seeing _you,_ just made me realize all over again that I wasn’t. Over you. And that probably makes me an idiot, I know.” The corner of his mouth twists. “But just knowing that hasn’t really helped so far.”

“I didn’t know,” Elliot protests, a little brokenly. “Or I mean, I didn’t think—I never—Jonah, I thought _you_ thought we were on, on different planes of existence, or something.”

Jonah frowns. “Did you think all those times we worked together, I only cared about the shows? Of course I enjoyed the writing, but a big part of it was because I was writing with _you.”_ He shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. “I make my best music when I’m with you, Elliot. I always have.”

They lapse into silence again, which Elliot is grateful for, because it gives him time to think of what to say. How is it possible, he wonders, that you can fundamentally misunderstand your entire relationship with someone for as long as you’ve had it? That you can have lived with them, shared some of the happiest, most important years of your life with them—and still completely miss the way they’ve been looking at you? The way they wanted you to look back?

“When you left,” Elliot says finally, his voice soft. “I think I thought...this is how all of this ends, you know? With that plus graduation, I was scared it was all going to be over before we’d even really had a chance to start.” He blinks. “And then I...resented you, for leaving, even after it was clear that we were going to keep on being Shenanigans with or without you. Because you’d helped us build this thing out of nothing and then you—went on to make a real _career_ out of it, and we were, I was still just there.”

Jonah’s expression softens a little. “I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to leave,” he says.

“I know,” Elliot says. “And I...I didn’t know, or maybe I just didn’t want to believe, that you—felt this way. About me.” His face is growing warm again. “If I had, I’d have—“

Jonah makes a tiny scoffing noise. “Magically started being nicer to me?”

“I should have at least been a better friend to you,” Elliot says quietly. “Whether or not I knew. And then maybe things could have been different.”

“Well...what’s done is done.” Jonah breathes in, breathes out slowly. Meets Elliot’s gaze, and what’s in his eyes isn’t anything like a challenge. He looks, Elliot realizes, almost scared. “So I guess the question is,” Jonah says quietly, “what do you want to happen now?”

“I don’t know.” Elliot swallows. “God, I’m sorry, I know this is going to be weird and confusing and messed up as hell. Because I don’t know how to give you specifics. But all I know is I don’t—I don’t want to push you away again.”

Jonah pauses, like he’s weighing Elliot’s words carefully, and then he says, “Remember when I said I was considering coming back? The thing is, I...don’t have to renew my contract at the end of this season.”

And Elliot gets what he’s saying. That he was just never able to see Jonah this way before—but now that he is, a whole world of possibilities has opened up in front of him. And that here and now, Jonah is right there, _wanting_ him, wanting to _be with_ him—and Elliot thinks it would be so easy, to do the reckless thing and give in and say _fuck it,_ and _let’s do it,_ and _yes—_

But Elliot knows he has to do the hard thing now. So he shakes his head and says, “Jonah, you can’t move back to Boston for me.”

Jonah looks more than a little pained. “I wouldn’t just be moving for you,” he says. “I told you, I’ve always thought—I could make a life there again.”

“But you deserve to be wherever your life is now,” Elliot retorts, a little more forcefully. “Jonah—you love what you’re doing in LA. I can see it. You’re _good_ at it. You could be doing so many more incredible things over there—and you will. I know you will.”

Jonah looks a little stunned, but slowly, what Elliot is saying seems to sink in. He nods.

“And—“ Elliot bites his lip. “Look, it took me this long to figure out that it wasn’t that I hated you, and that I—actually missed having you around. And you don’t deserve to just be picking up the broken pieces of me in the aftermath of my own mess. You deserve a fair shot at something real. And honestly, I don’t know yet if I can tell you that that’s going to be with me.” He exhales. “But I have to take some time to get over Nicholas, and I have to figure out what I want, and I—have to have a good track record of not being an asshole to you first, before I can try and give you an answer.” He looks up at Jonah tentatively. “But I do want to try. Is...that okay?”

Jonah is regarding him with what seems like a mixture of relief, and sadness, and understanding and—pride, all at once. “Yes,” he murmurs. “Elliot. It’s okay.”

Then Jonah tips his head back, to look up at the clouds drifting lazily across the sky. “After the show ends, I’ll see,” he says. “Where I am. Where I want to be next.”

Elliot nods. “If something else happens along the way, though,” he says. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

“You don’t tell me what to do,” Jonah replies with mock asperity. And before he can help himself, Elliot grins, and Jonah levels his gaze at him and smirks back.

“Can I say something?” Elliot asks after a minute.

Jonah gives a little bemused shrug. “Go ahead.”

“This week has been really fucking _weird,”_ Elliot blurts out, and Jonah bursts out laughing. Eventually, so does Elliot, and Cillian Meowphy pokes his head around the doorjamb at the sound, looking utterly confused.

“I almost forgot,” Jonah says, after they’ve both calmed down. “What were you writing before I so rudely interrupted?”

“The finale number.” Elliot presses middle C on the keyboard experimentally. “I think…I think I have the words for it now.”

Jonah tilts his head. “Can I hear them?” he asks.

So Elliot stands behind the keyboard in the garden and plays it for Jonah, the song they wrote together. _“At the end of the world, I will remember your face,”_ he sings, and Jonah smiles.

“Hey,” Elliot says when he’s done, the echoes of the final notes fading out. “If our lives were a musical, what do you think our song would be? You and me?”

Jonah rolls his eyes and picks up one of the remaining wires to finish hanging them over the trellis. “God, not something horribly obvious like ‘What Is This Feeling?’”

Elliot passes him the next one. “You know, I was going to suggest ’Anything You Can Do,’ but that works too.”

“Or ‘I Guess I’ll Miss The Man.’ Ha.”

“You think our song is a _Pippin_ song? _Really?”_

“Oh, don’t even try to pretend your heart doesn’t soar every time you hear ‘Corner of the Sky.’”

“Well, it doesn’t. Though I will admit to a soft spot for Patina Miller.”

“You know, sometimes I think you exist entirely to be contrary to everyone else.”

_“Excuse_ me, I do _not.”_

Suddenly Elliot’s phone buzzes, at the exact same time Jonah’s rings. Elliot checks his screen to see a text from Nicholas: _Hey where are you? What’s happening??_

_Uhhhhh,_ Elliot replies. _Tell you later._

“I know, Hazel,” Jonah is saying into his phone, wincing slightly. “No, yes, I know, we’re just—“ He looks somewhat helplessly at Elliot. “Finishing up here.”

_“Okay, well, hurry the fuck up,”_ Elliot hears Hazel huff loudly on the other end, and then she hangs up.

Jonah sighs as he stows his phone in his pocket. “Our public awaits, apparently.”

Elliot turns and looks at Jonah standing there, frowning slightly and somewhat disheveled, and more unguarded and human than Elliot can ever recall seeing him before—and in this one small moment inhabited only by the two of them, where they’re finally meeting each other on level ground, Elliot tells himself firmly, _here is someone who cares about me. Here is someone I care about, and who I want to be better for._

So Elliot grins, and says, “Come on, Bianca,” and plucks Jonah’s coat off the back of the chair and tosses it to him. The frown clears from Jonah’s face, replaced by something that’s maybe close to wonder. “We’ve got magic to do.”

\--

The concert is beyond belief.

Around them, the stage is awash with colors from the lights, so rich they almost seem solid, and as soon as they step out and announce, “Good afternoon, Dublin!” the hall reverberates with shouts from the crowd and then, with their music. The audience is full of fans wearing homemade _I’m Coming Out of the Wardrobe_ or _Redshirts Rise_ T-shirts—screaming in delight every time they recognize the song they’re transitioning into, singing along at the top of their lungs. Blake comes out in the Aslan costume and everyone goes wild, and then Jonah comes out as Castafiore and they go even wilder. They perform “Boldly Go” and “The Next Great Story” and Elliot feels it again, that same overwhelming pride and happiness and love he felt, back when they were all still just college kids doing this for the very first time.

At the halfway mark, it’s time for everyone else to get a bit of a breather backstage, while Elliot and Nicholas emerge again to cheers from the audience. As Nicholas grabs a stool, Elliot positions himself behind the keyboard and says into his mic, “So this is a song from a new musical we have coming up,” glissing on the keyboard just for the heck of it. Everyone cheers some more. “It’s a one hundred percent original story—or, well, I guess I should say ninety-eight percent original, and two percent an apology to Russell T. Davies.”

_“Hey,”_ Hazel yells from offstage. The crowd laughs.

“The music is still kind of rough,” Elliot adds, as he starts to lightly play around with the first notes of the song, “so bear with us.”

“Elliot’s being modest, they’re really very good,” Nicholas says warmly into his own mic.

“Why, thank you, Nicholas dear,” Elliot replies. A couple of people in the audience squeal.

Blinking and taking a deep breath, Elliot strikes a dramatic chord. “Okay. Are you ready?”

Under the lights, Nicholas turns to him, and he’s smiling. “For you? Always,” he says, and Elliot grins back at him and launches into the riff.

And the two of them sing it together, and the room goes absolutely quiet to listen—and when their short set is over, the fans explode into applause and cheering, and Nicholas laughs and crosses the stage and hugs Elliot tight. Disappearing backstage, they’re both immediately enveloped in a flurry of hugs and high-fives from the others, and Jane fights her way through to Elliot so she can throw her arms around him.

Over Jane’s shoulder, Elliot sees Jonah, smiling and holding his hands up so Elliot can see him clapping, and for a second he feels his breath catch in his chest as he smiles back.

The rest of the concert goes on, and before they know it, they’re all strolling out for the encore. “Wow,” Hazel remarks, shielding her eyes with one hand and looking out at the crowd. “You folks are incredible. Tonight was incredible. Thank you so much.”

“Thanks to all the crew, security, and staff for making this happen, and thanks to StrangelyCon for inviting us to your gorgeous country,” Evan says enthusiastically. “Let’s give ‘em all a hand. And hey, let’s do this again sometime! Call us.”

Blake sweeps an arm towards Jonah. “We all feel really lucky that Jonah here could take time out of his terrifically busy schedule to join us.” The fans shriek _we love yous_ and applaud him wildly.

“And I’m lucky to still be able to call these fantastically talented people my friends,” Jonah responds, smiling graciously. “Please, a hearty round of applause for them,” and the fans are only too happy to oblige.

“And again, we all feel so, so lucky to have you,” Caroline tells the audience, putting a hand on her heart. “Thank you for making these past few years so wonderful.”

“We wouldn’t have had them without you,” Kate says, and Anna chimes in, “And we hope you’ll stick around for a few more.”

“All right, kids,” Elliot says, starting to jog in place. “Do we have it in us to do one last song?”

“Somehow, I think we do.” Jane passes behind him to get into place, and they exchange a low-five.

“Oh, God,” Nicholas mutters wearily, and everyone laughs.

Jonah grins and turns to the audience, spreading his arms wide. “And a-five, six, seven, eight!” he calls.

And when they all sing _“I’m coming out of the wardrobe and it’s gonna be all right,”_ the crowd sings it back to them, and Elliot thinks it’s never sounded so perfect.

 

The end of the concert feels so much like he’s floating through a dream, that Elliot almost forgets they still have the Q&A and signing afterwards. Exhausted but glowing, they sit next to each other behind the long table and joke around with their panel moderator, and then nod encouragingly at the fans who step up to the mic stand in the center of the aisle.

The first person asks about whether they’d all planned on having careers in the theatre, and Nicholas clears his throat and says, “Um, well, to be honest, I thought I was going to do this thing once and never again,” and everyone laughs knowingly. Then someone asks about how they get in character for their roles, and Jonah answers, “On my end, I always make it a point to do research—so for Caspian, for example, I studied a lot of swordplay videos, and wrote to Doctor Cornelius in-character.”

Elliot makes an indignant noise. Surreptitiously, he pulls his phone out under the tablecloth and starts a text to Jonah. _Oh my god, is that really what you were doing this whole time? You know these are parody musicals right, it’s not that deep_

On the other end of the table, the faintest crease appears on Jonah’s forehead, and Elliot watches him glance underneath the table. The reply arrives within a few seconds, and he can practically hear Jonah’s arch tone: _I can’t help it if I take my job seriously_

Then Jonah’s next message reads, _Also, pray tell, what exactly are we doing texting under the table like we’re in high school?_

Elliot inhales, and carefully keeps his expression neutral as he types out his reply.

_I just thought if we’re going to be long-distance friends, we’d better start getting used to communicating like this._

Anyone watching Jonah at that moment might think he was smiling at Hazel answering the fans’ questions. Probably that’s all it is, Elliot thinks. Then his phone buzzes against his knee, and Elliot spares it one last look, for the text that’s just come in.

_Looking forward to it,_ it says.

At the mic stand, a fan is asking, “Can you tell us more about the new musical?”

“Well. It’s about a world-weary bookseller and a mysterious, dashing time-traveler, who embark on a quest together to save post-apocalyptic Antarctica,” Hazel replies. The crowd _oohs._ “And as for what happens after that...” She glances sideways at Elliot.

Elliot gives her a nod, and then leans forward into the mic, and winks at the fan and says, “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

 

It’s evening when they get back to the house, and as soon as Elliot unlocks the front door, Anna starts to peel off her boots and step over the threshold. _“Wait!”_ Elliot and Caroline yell at the same time.

Anna yelps and nearly falls over in the middle trying to pull her right boot off. _“What?”_

“It’ll only take a second,” Elliot says. “Promise,” and then he flings open the door and dashes inside.

“What the fuck,” Anna says.

Caroline lifts her camera. “Okay, ready?” she yells.

“Ready,” Elliot yells back from inside the house. “Set—“

And everyone bursts out singing the medley of Anna’s favorite songs that Evan and Elliot put together, harmonizing beautifully with Evan leading, as he takes Anna by the hand and they all usher her gently through the door and down the front hall, so she can see that the house is full of sunflowers—in the vase on the hall table, tucked into the umbrella stand, in drinking glasses on the kitchen counter, and in a giant bouquet that Kate picks up and deposits into Anna’s arms. Fairy lights are strung up all over the kitchen and the sunroom and lead out into the garden, where Elliot and Jonah hung them over the trellis earlier to create a canopy of warm light, and next to where Elliot is now playing the keyboard to accompany their singing.

Anna looks around at all of them in amazement, and when they’re both standing underneath the trellis, speckled with gold, Evan takes both her hands in his. _“Someone,”_ he tells her, grinning, “thought I should do this onstage. But I told him you’re the kind of person who prefers a much smaller audience.” Then Evan gets down on one knee, and takes out the ring, and says, “Anna Martinez, my adorable bumblebee, love of my life, dearest of my heart—would you do me the biggest favor ever and, just maybe, marry me?”

Anna grabs Evan by the shoulders and pulls him back to his feet. “Get up, oh my God, yes, _yes,”_ she says, her eyes glistening, and kisses him as everyone cheers and hugs each other and jumps up and down.

“Jesus, Caroline, stop crying,” Blake demands tearfully.

_“You_ stop crying,” Caroline retorts equally tearfully, swatting him on the arm.

Everyone goes around congratulating the happy couple, and when it’s Elliot’s turn he ducks in to kiss Anna on the cheek. “Congratulations on your engagement,” he tells her. “Sorry I couldn’t get you a rollercoaster.”

Anna laughs. “You guys _are_ my rollercoaster,” she says, and squeezes him tight.

“Come on.” Elliot beams. “Your engagement feast awaits.”

Dinner is pancakes, and many toasts with champagne, and then many more rounds of the Bowls game like they always used to do, that keep them laughing long into the night. And as Elliot sits on the living room sofa next to Nicholas, protesting the legality of Hazel and Jane’s clues as they pelt him with cushions, and as Jonah moves to settle tentatively on Elliot’s other side—Elliot reminds himself, over and over: _this. No matter what, I think we get to keep this._

 

\--

\--

 

_(epilogue: sunday)_

 

“I still think we can squeeze in one or two more sights later today,” says Hazel as they’re walking along the Liffey. “I mean, who knows when we’ll all be able to take a trip like this together again?”

“Our _wedding,”_ Anna says, brushing her hair back over her ear. Her engagement ring glitters on her hand. “Obviously.”

“Can’t it be sooner than that?” Caroline sighs. “We could, I don’t know, take a road trip to the Grand Canyon or something.”

“Caro, I love you, but the Grand Canyon is vastly overrated,” Elliot says. Jane is letting him hold her hand as they walk, on the condition that he doesn’t swing it back and forth.

“It’s not overrated,” Tim says, sounding mildly offended. “It’s one of the seven wonders of the natural world.”

Elliot smiles indulgently. “Oh, didn’t you know? They changed the seven wonders of the natural world several years ago. They’re so much more interesting now than just a silly big hole in the ground, dear Timberly.”

Tim frowns. “Wait, what was that?”

“The Grand Canyon is out.” Elliot snaps a quick rhythm. “Komodo Island is in. Keep up, Timantha.”

Tim lifts his eyes to the heavens and groans.

They reach the bridge and edge around the gaggles of pedestrians and tourists making their way across, to stand in a huddle by the railing. As they do, Jonah calls out, “Hey, Blake,” and grins as he turns to him. “So I may have taken it upon myself to compile a bunch of your stuff into a portfolio and sent it to my agent,” he says. “And she may have said that after we’re done here, that she wants you to give her a call. After which you _may_ have to fly out to LA, maybe just for a few weeks.”

Blake stares.

Jonah shrugs. “I mean, if you want.”

_“What?”_ Blake squeaks. “What—did you send her?”

“Well, since someone so kindly pointed me towards your _Sure Thing_ production, I started with the clips from that.” Jonah tilts his head, amused. “Which then led me to all the other stuff I apparently still had of yours from over the years. I suppose spending so much time with you this week reminded me.”

To his credit, Blake makes a valiant effort to play it cool. “Cool,” he says, and makes a kind of strangled sound. “Thank—thank you.” He does something halfway between finger guns and two thumbs-up. “Cool thank.” Caroline pats him consolingly on the shoulder.

Elliot clears his throat. “In the event that all this does happen,” he says slowly. “Would either of you…mind if I tag along?”

Jonah blinks at him, and Elliot meets his gaze steadily. “I was just thinking,” Elliot says. “That I’d like to see LA.”

The wind is in Jonah’s hair, playing with the ends of his scarf, and his eyes are bright and clear in the afternoon light. “That would be nice,” he says, and the small smile they exchange feels like a puzzle piece falling into place. It feels, Elliot thinks, like it could be the first of many.

Hazel squints at Elliot. “You got the goods?”

“Yep.” Elliot fishes the gaudy shamrock-shaped padlock that he bought in the souvenir shop out of his pocket, along with a Sharpie. They all take turns printing their initials on the padlock in tiny letters, and then Anna writes _Shenanigans, August 2019_ on the very top, and they clamp it around one of the bars on the bridge railing until it’s securely locked, there for the indefinite future.

“Okay.” Elliot takes the key out. “Who wants to do the honors?”

“Let’s all do it,” Caroline says, putting her hand over his.

Elliot holds the key in the palm of his hand and curls his fingers around it, and everyone clasps their hands over his fist. “One,” he announces.

“Two,” Nicholas says.

Jonah smiles. “Three.”

All of them throw, and Elliot opens his hand, and the key goes sailing out through the air and into the Liffey. They watch it land and sink beneath the water, and for a while, they just stand there, not speaking. Hazel and Jonah are leaning against each other, and Evan’s arms are around Anna, and Jane is tucked into Nicholas’s side. And Elliot looks sideways for a moment at all of his friends next to him and smiles, before turning back to look out at the wide river that goes on and on, out into the sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C’est fini! 8D
> 
> I am…actually supposed to be writing an entirely different novel about a large group of friends doing musical theatre at the moment, but I got completely sidetracked by this fic, and it was a very fun detour and so, so incredibly worth it. (please don’t tell my agency though, they’re probably wondering why I haven’t emailed them yet even though I promised to like, two months ago ahaha)
> 
> So I wrote this fic for, in case you couldn’t already tell, three of my favorite writers on the planet, who wound up filling my inbox with so much kindness and love over the course of it. Thank you Ceece for being an absolute peach and for all your headcanons and support and co-yelling and co-crying, and for patting my head with the broom every time Jonah tried to murder me. Thank you Aja and EGT for creating these characters that you’ve been so unbelievably cool about letting me make Shenanigans Puppet Pals mischief with; I’ll always have your stories to come back to and love more and more as time goes by. I’m so glad I didn’t let this idea fester and die in a folder on my laptop like I very nearly did, and whenever I feel like I can’t write or like I’m a garbage human, I’ll have all your incredibly thoughtful and sweet comments to look back on, so thank you thank you. This has meant the world to me. lies facedown in the sandbox
> 
> To anyone else if you’re reading this—if you made it this far, thank you so much! And if you’re new—hello, my name is May, and I’m most active on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/anhgryboys), though I also have a [Tumblr](https://mayerwien.tumblr.com/) (where I may put up some last chapter notes and other end-of-fic thoughts in the near future, idk?). (EDIT: [Chapter 4 notes and other end-of-fic thoughts post](https://mayerwien.tumblr.com/post/185467985392/this-is-no-doctor-who-musical-chapter-4-notes) is up, haha.) Please come and say hi if you are so inclined; I mostly yell about my many fandoms and complain about all the things I'm writing (or am supposed to be writing, heh), but I'm always up for a chat or to answer questions about anything.
> 
> And finally, if anyone likes this humble AU and would like to come play in this universe too, you don't even need to ask--but in the event that you do, please show me whatever you make when it's done, I would be so super happy. :') On my end, I don't quite know what I'm going to do next, but I have a feeling that whatever it is, I'm going to enjoy it.
> 
> THANK YOU! <3, May


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